You Can Use This, You Know.

"No one would have chosen this. No one is that crazy. To have your life disrupted. To be out of work. To lose money or people you love. To see institutions taxed beyond their capacities. To see people scared or frustrated. But this pandemic is a classic 'there it is' situation. It’s here. It happened. Now what?"Ryan lays out the perspective you should use in considering the pandemic and its ramifications in today's Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

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  You can use this, you know. No one would have chosen this. No one is that crazy to have your life disrupted, to be out of work, to lose money or people you love, to see institutions taxed beyond their capacities, to see people scared or frustrated. But this pandemic is a classic "there it is" situation. It's here. It happened. Now what? We should think about the advice from the writer Jorge Luis Borges. "A writer," he said, "and I believe generally all persons, must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes,

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  our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art." You have the power to do this. We all do. We don't have the power to start the V-shaped economic recovery. We don't have the power to create more ventilators or magically fix the regulatory and government agencies that fail to stop or respond properly to this crisis. We lack tragically the power to resuscitate the victims who this virus has claimed. To decide to use this as raw material, to learn from it, to transform it, to find an opportunity within it, yes, that remains in our power. Everything is material. We can use it all. Just as issues we had with our parents become lessons that we teach

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  our children, or an injury that lays us up in bed becomes a reason to reflect on where our life is going, or a problem at work inspires us to invent a new product, strike out on our own, so too can this crisis be something that allows us To move forward and grow. A great artist uses what happens to them, Borges said. A strong stomach, Marcus Aurelius said, digests what it eats. A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it. That can happen here, too. If you choose, if you seize the power that you have, be the painter of your own picture, the sculptor of your own life. It's the only way forward. It's the only thing you can do. And that's that Stoic idea of a morfati,

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  that we can use what's happened to us, that we can love it, that we can embrace and accept and find power and meaning in our fate. It's why we make the amorfati coin here in the Daily Stoic Stoic, as well as the amorfati pendant necklace. Amorfati, Robert Greene said, is a power so immense, it's almost hard to fathom. And he's right. To me, it's the perfect remedy or coping mechanism for the reality of this pandemic. We can't choose what happened, but we can choose how we respond. And we can choose to love this and embrace it and seize meaning from it. And that's what amorfati is. And so you can check out our amorfati products here in the Daily Stoic Stoic, dailystoic.com/store. Hey, thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast.

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