Don’t Let Them Steal This Too

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1:54Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

2:21Don't let them steal this too. People will take things from you, as we talked about recently with Epictetus and his lamp. People will betray you, as Marcus Aurelius was by his most trusted general, Avidius Cassius. People will lie, they will cheat, they will break the rules, they will blow apart what the Romans called the mas morium, the old ways, which Cato knew all too well. And this will be painful. It will be costly. But the one thing you can't allow them to take from you, the one thing you really have to protect is your belief in your love for those very same people. In meditations, Marcus Aurelius talks about being in the ring with someone who is fighting dirty.

2:59He says you can't let them turn you into a dirty fighter or worse, drive you from the ring altogether. In many places in his writings, he comes back to this idea to not let inhumanity drive him away from humanity, to not give up on people, to not become cynical or bitter, to not be implicated in the ugliness. When Epictetus was robbed, he could have become sullen or scared. He could have become paranoid or suspicious. Instead, he just got a new lamp. When Marcus Aurelius was betrayed, he could have descended into the dark places that many emperors, who lived in fear of assassination daily, that they descended into.

3:35Instead, he tried to use it as an opportunity to show how civil strife could be dealt with peacefully. He tried to forgive. It sucks that you were lied to, stolen from, abused, cheated, your trust taken advantage of, and there's no way you can get that back. But what you can do is make sure that the most important thing of all remains in your possession. Your love of other people, your tolerance from them, your willingness to help and do good for them. Don't let that be stolen too, because it's priceless.

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