Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off, the little dose of courage and discipline and justice in wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com. Failure doesn't define you, and neither does success.
Of course, he was disappointed. It had been a long and hard fall. He descended from West Point to second lieutenant during the Mexican-American War, but now Ulysses S. Grant was selling firewood by the side of the road.
He must have hoped that no one would recognize him and his heart would have sank when Simon Buckner, an old school and war buddy, did. Could God grant you, bers, what are you doing? But Grant decided he would not be ashamed. I am solving the problem of poverty, he replied.
Grant knew what the stoics knew that outside circumstances don't say anything about us at all, that it didn't matter, as Epicty said, what we bear, only how we bear it. That was feeding his family. He was doing honest work. What was so bad about that?
After all, Cleampes was a lowly water carrier and Athens, and proud of it. Now had Grant been caught stealing to support his drinking habit, that would have been different. Or if he'd accepted a Confederate commission because the pay was better. Again, that would be different.
As I talked about in my episode with Ron Chernow on the Daily Stocock House, who wrote one of his best biographies about Grant, Grant understood this so-called menial work of selling firewood didn't say anything about him. What he cared about was making an honest living and providing for his family. The position didn't define him, and not only was this position temporary, but a few years later he would become General of the Union Army, and a few years after that, President of the United States. And yet again, Grant would refuse to let those high positions to find him either.
As Marcus Realists commanded himself, we must accept it without arrogance, and let it go within difference. Like Grant, he saw that success and failure were meaningless. They were impostors. A rock thrown in the air gains nothing by going up, he said, and nothing by falling down.
What matters is who we are. What matters is the character we live by. Always the same. This is today's entry in the Daily Stellock.
Think by way of example on the times of Vespasian, and you'll see all these things marrying, raising children, falling ill, dying wars, holiday feasts, commerce, farming, flattering, pretending, suspecting, scheming, praying that others die, grumbling over one's lot, falling in love, amassing fortunes, lusting after office and power. Now that life of theirs is dead and gone, the times of Trajan, again the same. Marcus Realists' meditations, 4, 32, and the meditation. Ernest Hemingway opens his book, The Sun Also Rises with a Bible Verse, One Generation Pathus, and another Generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever.
The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and resteth to the place where she arose. It was this passage as fascinating editor Maxwell Perkins, who I urge you to read about. Perkins would say that it contained all the wisdom of the ancient world, and what wisdom is that? One of the most striking things about history is just how long human beings have been doing what they do.
Though certain attitudes and practices have come and gone, what's left are people living, dying, loving, fighting, crying, and laughing. Breathless media reports or popular books often perpetuate the belief that we've reached the apex of humanity, or that this time things are really different. The irony is that people have believed that for centuries. Strong people have to resist this notion.
They know that with few exceptions, things are the same as they've always been and always will be. You're just like the people who came before you, and you're but a brief stopover until the people, just like you, who will come after. The earth abides forever, but we will come and go. I mean, I think meditations itself is a remarkable demonstration of this, probably not accidentally, right?
Marcus is talking about complaining about worrying about seizing on are immensely familiar and accessible to all of us, right? Two thousand years ago, sometime in the year, let's say 160 AD, Marcus struggles to get out of bed and writes a passage about how he likes to huddle under the blankets and stay warm. Exactly the same, right? You think about the struggles Marcus really has with Commodus.
Maybe that's what you're going through right now. You think of Seneca trying to contain Nero, telling himself, you know, I'm one of the good guys. I'm one of the adults in the room, and you think about how politically people in the capital, which is named after Capitoline Hill, senators, right, same position as people like Seneca had, we're telling themselves about the current president, right? The same thing over and over and over and over again, people are places, our places, I did a meditation on this.
We did this road trip and we stopped in Tombstone, Arizona, which, you know, is the site of the gunfight at O.K. Corral. And what's fascinating is you walk down the streets of Tombstone. This is a place that's burned to the ground and been rebuilt to look historic for the most part.
Some of the buildings actually are pretty old. But the point is, these bars, what stickers do they have in the window? The sticker is new. That wasn't a technology in 1880 or whatever.
They got these stickers in the window. What do the stickers say? You can't carry a handgun inside this establishment, right? Same sticker I have on the front of the painted porch.
But in the 1880s, that's what the gunfight at the O.K. Corral was about. It was about whether people could openly carry guns in town. I'm not making a second amendment argument here.
I'm saying that people were fighting and arguing about the exact same thing, just as the Earps had moved to Tombstone, Arizona, why? To make their fortune, to make a name for themselves, to have a better life, the same reason that maybe you're moving to Arizona or Austin or Europe, right? It doesn't matter. People are people and they've always been doing the same things.
And I think what's so beautiful and reassuring but also humbling about stoic philosophy is these reminders that not that much has changed, that the hardware issues remain the same. The software issues remain the same despite all the updates and attempts to fix the bugs. So we can calm down a little bit, right? People are people, places or places, histories.
The same thing happening over and over and over again. Time, as Matthew McConaughey's character says, in true detective quoting Nietzsche. Time is a flat circle. It's beautiful, as I said, haunting, humbling, all these things at the same time.
And it's something we can't lose track of and it's something we have to think about constantly. And when I hold meditations, that's what I think of. I've actually got the leather edition right here in my hands. Since I got my first copy of meditation, I've been going through that one.
Like I have a very worn copy, has lots of notes in it. I went through and I've been rereading it, it's on my nightstand. As I've been going through and rereading it, what strikes me most is that I've still making notes in the same spots about the same things just as other people have been doing for thousands of years. Maybe you have Seneca on your nightstand just as Jefferson had Seneca on his nightstand when he died, just as, you know, Cato died holding the copy of Socrates, right?
It's a timeless tradition we're a part of, both intentionally and unintentionally. And there's something beautiful and terrifying in that. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stood podcast.
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