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 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com. This is what it gave you.
Parenting can present us some of our greatest tests. Your son has dyslexia. Your oldest has behavioral issues. The youngest is on the spectrum.
Your daughter has a chronic health issue. Your kid has trouble regulating emotions. These are challenges, to be sure, challenges for you, challenges for them. It's not easy, and it's not cheap.
There are accommodations you'll have to make. There will be things you need to buy. There will be things that you and they will not get to do. There will be heartbreak, heartbreak that both Marcus Aurelius and Seneca experienced after the devastating loss of their own children far too young.
But as always, the Stoics remind us that everything has its compensation if we choose to see it, if we choose to welcome it. The challenges we face as parents become our greatest teachers and guides. You'll have moments at the dialysis center that years from now, you wouldn't trade for anything. You'll develop patience and resilience that you could not have otherwise imagined.
And they will too. You will learn how to advocate for yourself and for them. You'll come face to face with this thing called acceptance. You will understand what it means to love, to really love unconditionally.
This thing with your kid, you wouldn't have wished for it. You wouldn't have wished it on them or indeed on any other parent. And yet, you are coming to see that it gave you something. It gave you perspective on what truly matters, on what real strength looks like.
It gave you connection to your child, to yourself, to others who have gone down this road. It gave you purpose to fight for them, to guide them, to help them navigate a world that isn't always built for them. And most of all, it gave you love. Not the easy, effortless kind, but the kind forged through trials.
The kind that endures. The kind that, in the end, makes it all worth it. And by the way, if you didn't know, we also have a parenting daily email and daily podcast called The Daily Dad, which is like The Daily Show. It's built on one piece of steamship wisdom every day, applied to life practically.
There's a Daily Dad book that came out a year and a half ago. There's a cool other edition too. You can grab all those at store.dailydad.com. I'll sign one if you want.
And you can sign up for free for The Daily Dad email and The Daily Dad podcast if you want to add another little minute or two ritual to your day. And we do a weekend deep dive. Sometimes it's me, my wife. It's really cool because I've gotten so much out of doing it.
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W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. Whatnot.com slash sell. Learn, practice, train. This is today's entry, May 19th, from the Daily Stoic.
And the first quote comes to us from Epictetus 219 in the Discourses. That's why philosophers warn us not to be satisfied with mere learning, but to add practice and then training, he says. For as time passes, we forget what we learn and end up doing the opposite and hold opinions the opposite of what we should hold. And then we meditate.
Very few people can simply watch an instructional video or hear something explained and then know backward and forward how to do it. Most of us actually have to do something several times in order to truly learn. One of the hallmarks of the martial arts, military training, athletic training of almost any kind is the hours upon hours of monotonous practice. An athlete at the highest level will train for years to perform movements that can last mere seconds or less.
The two-minute drill, how to escape from a chokehold, the perfect jumper. Simply knowing isn't enough. It must be absorbed into the muscles in the body. It must become part of us.
You can't just hear something once and expect to rely on it when the world is crashing down around us. Remember, Mark Serulis wasn't writing these meditations for other people. He was actively meditating for himself. Even as a successful, wise, and experienced man, he was until the last days of his life practicing and training to do the right thing.
Like a black belt, he was still showing up to the dojo every day to rule. Like a professional athlete, he still showed up to practice each week, even though others thought it was unnecessary. Admiral James Debritt has a sort of framework for responding well to the crucible of decision. And he says that you have to prepare in advance, right?
In the military, you don't rise to the occasion. You sink to the level of your training. You have to meditate on this stuff over and over and over again. He says two big things.
He says, one, you have to know what you believe. You have to know your standards. He talks about sailing true north. He says, what's true north?
What do you believe? What do you ascribe to? Right? And that's partly why we study the stoics, to learn what we hold sacred or dear, what the right thing is.
And he says, you also have to know yourself, what you're capable of, what your weaknesses are, what your tendencies are, what your biases are. So then in that moment of stress or difficulty or pressure, you know what you need to think about, what you need to turn to, what you default to. Epictetus says that the key of stoicism is so that when life hits you with stuff, you're able to say, this is what I trained for. And I think Epictetus is reminding us, though, that it's not a single preparation, that if you prepare once, the second you stop, entropy is working on that preparation.
There's an expiration date to it. They have to constantly be updating and reinforcing and adding and reevaluating and going over it, over it, over it. And that's what meditations is to me. It's Marcus Aurelius saying stuff that he already knows.
He knows this stuff. He's studied it a bazillion times. He's heard it a billion times. But he's playing his scales each morning.
He's reviewing his note cards before the test each day, right? He's going back over the advice from his father and stepfather and mentors and heroes. He's getting it fresh in his mind. He's reminding himself of who he is, what he needs to do, what true north is.
So in those moments of crisis, in his case, a war, a flood, a coup, all this stuff, he was there. And think about Epictetus, right? First off, he studies and learns those as well as a slave, become the philosopher. But then, right, exile comes for him.
And he has to go through that again. If he hadn't been preparing and thinking and talking and keeping these thoughts at hand, that's the other joke idea. Write these things down, talk about them, post them up, go through it over and over and over again. Keep it top of mind.
That's what this is about. That's what we're doing here at Daily Stoke. That's why this is a daily practice. That's why I wrote the daily book.
That's why the journal is there. It's about the daily practice and the daily training of it. And I hope you avail yourself of it so when that moment comes, when you find yourself in the crucible of decision, you can do what you need to do. You can meet destiny as it hopes you will.
That's the thought for today. And I'll talk to you soon. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast.
I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in a couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor.
Please spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't the sound of anything. I just wanted to say thank you.