Come Back To This Later

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1:04Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

1:44Labor Day was first proposed by Matthew McGuire, a labor union secretary in 1882 in New York. It is, he said, a tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country, and the idea that they deserved a rest for that work. The Stoics were hard-driving, no-excuses, disciplined folks who, despite their acceptance of slavery in the ancient world, would still have appreciated this idea. The mind must be given relaxation. It will rise improved and sharper after a good break, Seneca wrote. He used the analogy of farming. A field that isn't given a break, where crops are not rotated, will quickly lose its fertility.

2:24And so too will a mind and a body that's overworked. So by all means, take your much-deserved break today. We are human beings, after all, not human doings. Life will be long if you're lucky and you have much great work in front of you. If you break down early, wear yourself out before your time, where will that leave you? Where will that leave us? In a way, overwork is selfish, no matter how much the workaholic claims they are doing it for other people, because it deprives them in the world of that later fertility. It causes needless breakdown and injury. As Seneca observed, constant work gives rise to a certain kind of dullness and feebleness in the rational soul.

3:03Nobody likes a person who is all business all the time. So go out today and live today. Rest from your labor. Come back better for it. come back improved and sharper for it. That's the idea. This is your holiday. Take it.

3:32A hard winter training. The art of living has three levels of discipline, study, practice, and hard training. Reading the Stoics or listening to them, that's study. Trying out the lessons and reflecting on them in a journal, the friend, that's practice. What's left, though, is hard training. Epictetus liked to use the analogy of the Roman army's practice of training hard in the off months of winter so that they could be prepared to meet any challenge when they returned to battle in the spring. Seneca would spend time each month exposing himself to tougher than usual conditions. He too used a military analogy, pointing to the way that soldiers are tasked with hard jobs so they could be strong when the enemy eventually came.

4:20So what are you doing in your life to push yourself beyond mere study and practice? And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living, by yours truly and my co-writer and translator Stephen Hanselman. But this idea of keeping the thoughts at hand really ties into this week's entry. We've got two quotes from Epictetus and one from Seneca. We must undergo a hard winter training and not rush into things for which we haven't prepared. That's Epictetus and his discourses. Here's Seneca in Moral Letters 18. Here's a lesson to test your mind's mettle.

5:01Take part of the week in which you have only the most meager and cheap food, dress scantily in shabby clothes, and ask yourself, this is really the worst you feared. It is when times are good that you should gird yourself for tougher times ahead. For when fortune is kind, the soul can build up defenses against her ravages. So it is that the soldiers practice maneuvers in peacetime, erecting bunkers with no enemies in sight, and exhausting themselves under no attack, so that when it comes, they won't grow tired. And then finally, Epictetus says, when a challenge confronts you, remember that God is matching you with a younger sparring partner, as would a physical trainer.

5:39Why? Because becoming an Olympian takes sweat. I think that no one has a better challenge than yours if only you would use it like an athlete would use a younger sparring partner. So a couple of things here. One, I sometimes get this question, should I seek out adversity if adversity is such a good teacher, should I seek it out? I say, look, for the most part, life is going to give us most of the training we need. Life's going to throw most of the adversity we need at us. So you don't need to go like getting yourself into trouble so you can know what a prison cell feels like, right? I don't think that's really what it is.

6:14As Epictetus is saying, look, instead of bemoaning the adversity when you do feel it, go like, hey, this is good. this is training I needed, I'm going to use this. So I think about it that way. The other part is, how are you, though, actively engaged in training that makes you stronger, more mentally tough, more physically tough? So to me, this is where like a strong physical practice comes in. It's also where getting up early, maybe intermittent fasting, maybe cold showers, but mostly working out because I love working out, but still every time I have to convince myself to do it, right? I love running.

6:53It's almost painful not to run, but there's still lots of days when I don't want to do it and still be easier to go slower. I have to push myself every single time. But every time I do it, I get better at pushing myself, right? I usually do some sort of weight training about four days a week as well. And so that is much less fun for me. And I really do have to push myself to do it. And that training, though, the act of pushing myself to do something that I'm uncomfortable with, that's not fun, that challenges me, this doesn't just make me stronger and more fit and better at chasing my kids around the house.

7:29What it really does is make me better at overriding that impulse that I don't want to do something because it's hard or that I'm afraid or that it's going to be exhausting. Again, I'm in the middle of a book right now. And you think I don't wake up so many days and I don't feel it. I don't want to do it. It's hard. What if I phone it in today? is anyone really watching? Will anyone know? Well, I've trained for exactly that kind of insidious opponent. I have, as Stephen Pressfield talks about, I know the resistance well. I have built up a lot of muscles that make me stronger than the resistance.

8:04And that's where this training comes in. And I think that's a metaphor for all forms of adversity, difficulty, resistance, weakness in life. And so I hope you have some sort of active practice. Use the adversity, train against it when it's there, but also build some active daily practices or weekly practices in your life as well.

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