Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcasts. On Friday, we do double duty not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works. Meditations, you could say, is Marcus Aurelius exploring himself?
That's literally what the title of the book means. The book isn't for you and I. It's things to oneself, to himself. Marcus is exploring his fears, his desires, his flaws, his virtues.
And that's the journey that philosophy took Marcus on, since he was a young man until right before his death, he was exploring himself, trying to understand himself and his nature better. But how about you? How well do you know the back roads of the self, as Marcus calls them in book four? You know every inch of the ride to work, you know this road or that city, you say, like the back of your hand.
But how well do you know yourself? Too many of us are total strangers to ourselves. We seek busyness, we seek external markers, we seek out others to understand us and demand that they hear what we're saying. Meanwhile, we ignore the voice inside us, the one that is whispering to us so many important lessons, the one that is shouting so many warnings, meditation and journaling and long conversations like the one between Seneca and Lucilius or us via Seneca and his writings.
This is how we get to know ourselves. This is the journey we have to go on because no one can go on it for us, because it won't matter where we go in life, we'll be lost if we don't find ourselves first. So in 2017, we did the Daily Stoke Journal, which is the idea of one question every day to meditate on that's built around the ideas in the Daily Stoke. And I like the idea of having some continuity of slip cover that goes on there.
It says make time on the front, which is often how I sign the journal. The idea is you've got to make time for philosophy, you've got to make time to get to know yourself. There's a cool quote from Seneca on the inside, one from Epictetus on the back, and there's a spot to hold your pen. And it's designed to fit the US edition, it'll fit the UK edition as well, not quite as snug, but it fits for both.
And if you haven't picked up the journal, you can get them as a package, I'll link to it in today's show notes or you can just grab the cover to throw it on your edition of the Daily Stoke Journal. Use it to get to know the back roads yourself, keep journaling everyone. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast.
Today, we are pushing for a deeper understanding. This is the January 24th entry in the Daily Stoke. I am back sitting in my office, so I am holding cloth-bound edition of the Daily Stoke 366 Meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living. If you want to sign copy, you can go to store dot daily stoic.com.
The quote is Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 17. From Rooster Keci writes, I learned to read carefully and not be satisfied with a rough understanding of the whole and not to agree too quickly with those who have a lot to say about something. The first book of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations begins with a catalog of gratitude. He thanks one by one, the leading influences in his life.
One of the people he thanks is Rooster Kecis, his philosophy teacher, who developed in his student a love of deep clarity and understanding, a desire to not just stop at the surface when it comes to learning things. It is also from Rooster Keci's that Marcus Aurelius was introduced to Epictetus. In fact, Rooster Kecis loaned Marcus his personal copy of Epictetus's lecture. Marcus clearly wasn't satisfied with just getting the gist of some of these lectures and didn't simply accept them on his teacher's recommendation.
Paul Johnson once joked that Edmund Wilson read books as though the author was on trial for his life. That's how Marcus read Epictetus. And when the lessons passed, muster, he absorbed them. They became part of his DNA as a human being.
He quoted them at length over the course of his life, finding real clarity and strength in the words, even amid the immense luxury and power he would come to possess. This is the kind of deep reading and study that we need to cultivate as well, which is why we're reading. We're listening in this case to one page a day in the Daily Stoke instead of a chapter at a time, so we can take the time to read attentively and deeply. I know it's funny.
I was working on something this morning for the Daily Stoke and I grabbed my copy of Mentations, which was sitting under this microphone. I'm recording to you now and this is not my oldest copy, my oldest copy. No, no, this is my, this is my main one. This is the one I bought in 2006, almost 20 years of miles on this thing.
And you can just see the different errors. There's green highlighter and yellow highlighter and I don't really use highlighter anymore and there's different pens and there's Sharpie. You know, you're marking things and you don't even know. You don't even know you're going to need them, right?
So this is the fourth entry. He says, my great grandfather to avoid the public schools to hire good private teachers and to accept the result in costs as money well spent. Now, obviously in the ancient world, private versus public schools are very different, depending on where you live, the debates are different. But it's just interesting to me that I marked down this thing before I even conceived of having kids.
And here I am thinking about where our youngest is going to go to school. And I pick up this book and I, oh, yeah, there's something about this, right? Like there's something about my copy of Meditations. It's almost, it's kind of its own commonplace book.
I mean, the first entry of Meditations, my grandfather, Varys character and self control. That's two of the books in the virtue series. Let's see what I have from Roostacus. I've marked here the first line, the recognition that I need to train and discipline my character, temperance.
I wrote a little note there, not to write treaties on abstract questions or deliver, moralizing little sermons or compose imaginary descriptions on the simple life of the man who is only for others, not to dress up to stroll around the house or things like that, to write straightforward letters and to behave in a conciliatory way when people who have angered or annoyed us want to make up. You know what's interesting was we talked about this in lines of the stokes, Marcus and Roostacus sometimes quarreled. But we're told that they made up very quickly, he's applying that in practice. But to read attentively and not be satisfied with getting the gist of it and to not fall for every smooth talker.
And I've got it circled in pencil. I've got it in orange highlighter and yellow highlighter. And then the line, which I mentioned earlier and for introducing me to Epictetus's lectures and loaning me his own copy. So this book and all these different passes over and over again, I'm taking something a little bit new and a little bit different.
And if I just read the book once, maybe that's the only time you've gone through it. Are you read Seneca's letters or you read some of Epictetus or whatever? The point is, it's about the going over, over and over and over again. That's what we're trying to get out of it.
And if you're just, oh, I get the gist of it. Oh, I heard it on a daily soap pack. I saw this on Instagram. Oh, I watched a little video about it.
No, you don't, you don't actually understand it. You own, it's only through this process of going over it over and over and over again that you really can even come to begin to understand what the stokes are talking about. I know that there are things I'm taking out of the Stoics for the first time now, 20 years into it. And if I could urge you anything on your journey through stoicism, it would be to dive into it that deeply and to not just read the same things more than once, but to read around them, to go down different rabbit holes, to get various bits of context.
But then when you come back to it, you're able to understand something you've read in a new way. That to me is the process of reading and understanding of the Stoics. And that's what Marcus was particularly grateful for Roostacus for showing him. And I'm grateful to both of them for showing that to me.
And I'm trying to pass that along to you now. Thanks so much for listening to the daily still podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoke.com slash email.