Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. There's a rhythm. There's a rhythm. It can feel like everything is falling to pieces, can feel like you're lost, it can feel like there's no hope, no way forward, nothing to do.
But that's just because you're rattled, that's just because you've gotten turned around. When jarred unavoidably by circumstances, Marx really reminds himself in meditations, we must revert at once to ourselves, don't lose the rhythm more than you can help, he says. You'll have a better grasp of the harmony if you can keep going back to it. What is this harmony he speaks of?
Probably the same one that Donnie Verosings and their song of the same name. The Stoics called this rhythm the Logos was the way the word the harmony of the universe and life in accordance with nature was the master plan, which is the thing we didn't know we needed, but of course we did. It was this rhythm that Zeno got back when he lost everything in a shipwreck, accepting that he was meant for something other than the merchant's trade. It was this that Marcus really tried to put his faith in after the funerals, after the betrayals, after the twists of fate.
We ourselves must understand that there is a rhythm. Inevitably, we will be jarred and scarred and kicked around by fortune, but we can always reclaim this rhythm in the harmony found within it. We can always revert to ourselves. It's how we get tall, find a new way forward.