Every Day Is A Chance For This | The Present Is All We Possess

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1:38Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast. 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.

2:14Every day is a chance for this. After a long winter, after so many days of putting things off, after so much has piled up, spring comes and gets us moving again. The budding flowers, the sprouting plants, the longer days, the warmer temperatures, these signs of rejuvenation remind us of the cyclical nature of life and the opportunity for growth and the renewal that accompanies each new season. We start new projects, we get cleaning, we get outside, and this is all wonderful. But should this be the only change that a new season ushers in? Epictetus would say that just as one person delights in improving his farm and another his horse, that he delighted in attending to his own improvement day to day.

3:01Delight, not a word you'd expect from Epictetus, but there it is. It can be found in such an unexpected way, not in material things, not in tidying up the garage, not in a hobby, but in oneself, in improving one's self. And that was the purpose of Stoicism, behind the journaling and the reading and the studying of this philosophy, behind the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge, which is going to start on Tuesday, the first day of spring. It's the idea that we can use each day as an opportunity to improve ourself action by action, step by step. This might not seem like much, as Zeno said, but it adds up to no small thing.

3:40Every one of us wants to improve, wants to be better, wants to have better habits, live better, think better. But most of us wait to launch the business, to write the novel, to develop that fitness routine tomorrow. We wait to do what we know is right. We'll do it when we're more secure. We say we'll do it later or in the fall or next year or when things get back to normal. But putting things off is the biggest waste of life, Seneca reminds us. It snatches away the present in exchange for some promised future. Every day is a new season. Every day is spring. Whatever hemisphere you're in, every day is a chance for a new beginning.

4:15Every day that we awake, we can choose a new life, a new way to rededicate ourselves to becoming the best versions of ourselves. As we've been saying, though, this spring is a chance to begin afresh, afresh, afresh. And that's what we're going to be doing in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. It's designed to push you to examine those parts of your life, those habits, those choices that could move you closer to living your best life. You could have that good life, the life you deserve right now. It's just a 10-day challenge. It's really short. It's punchy. It's to the point. There's going to be a live Q &A with me.

4:46There's an awesome community that we're having. And we want this new season to mark a new you. and if you want to join me and thousands of other Stoics all over the world doing the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge, I'd love to have you join us. You can head over to dailystoic.com slash spring to sign up right now. It's filling up really fast and once we get going, it's going and you'll want to be in it with us. It's best to do it live with all of us and I'm trying to think what else you want to know about it. It's going to be fun. If you're a Daily Stoic Life member, you get this challenge and all the challenges for free So sign up there at dailystoiclife.com.

5:23And I'm pumped just wrapping up spring break with my family. And then I'll be back in the swing of things to start this with all of you. And I'll see you soon. That's dailystoic.com slash spring.

5:53The present is all we possess. This is the March 15th entry in the Daily Stoic. I'm holding the hardcover in my hands. 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living. But of course, you can get it as an audiobook. You can get it as an e-book. We've even got a cool leather edition in the Daily Stoic store. And today's quote is Marcus Aurelius Meditations 2.14. So pretty early in meditations. It's one of the great quotes from the book. He says, Were you to live 3 ,000 years or even a countless multiple of that, keep in mind that no one ever loses a life other than the one they are living, and no one ever lives a life other than the one they are losing.

6:40The longest and the shortest then amount to the same. for the present moment lasts the same for all and is all anyone possesses. No one can lose either the past or the future for how can someone be deprived of what's not theirs? Today notice how often you look for more that is wanting the past to be more than what it was, different, better, still here, etc. Or wanting the future to unfold exactly as you expect with hardly a thought as to how that might affect other people. When you do this, you're neglecting the present moment. Talk about ungrateful. There's a saying attributed to Bill Keane, the cartoonist, worth remembering.

7:24Yesterday is the past, tomorrow's the future, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present. This present is in our possession, but it has an expiration date, a quickly approaching one. if you enjoy all of it it will be enough it can last a whole lifetime i had two thoughts i mean obviously i wrote the daily stoic now eight plus years ago but i was thinking as sometimes when i read them out loud to you guys i go oh i like that maybe i tweak this here's what i would add i just had this experience of going back through the obstacles away and there's just little things that I've picked up since then that I would add.

8:06And when I hear, I go, oh, maybe I'd add this or that. I'd put it down on the note cards. There's two little things, actually three. I'll give you two. The first two come from poems by William Blake. He says, he who binds himself to a joy does the winged life destroy. He who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity's sunrise. eyes. And then the other one is from a longer poem, Auguries of Innocence, one of my favorites. But he says, to see a world and a grain of sand and a heaven and a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. It's this idea that, you know the present is all that there is but the present is so so much and then my favorite i am i've talked about my love of uh the singer bonnie ver i'm pulling this up present so i don't mess it up because his lyrics are famously sort of enigmatic but my uh my favorite bonnie ver songs is blood bank actually we played it as my my wedding i think we uh i think we played it either when i walked down and then i waited for my wife hey i think that's when we played it may have been playing the whole intro i forget but i remember it's one of the songs we we picked but he says then the snow started falling we were stuck out in your car you were rubbing both my hands, chewing on a candy bar.

9:39You said, ain't this just like the present to be showing up like this? As a moon waned to crescent, we started to kiss. Anyways, getting a little outside of stoicism here, I guess, getting pretty poetic. But what I like about both of those is they're just sort of showing the infinite, the mystery, the wonderfulness of the present, right? We skip over it because we want what's next. We're worried about what's next and we don't want what's next. Or we're dwelling on the past, ruminating on the past, regretting the past. And what we're ignoring is the beauty and the wonderfulness and the mystery and the absurdity and the joy and the fun and the ordinariness of the moment that we're in right now.

10:30And when we slow down, when we We embrace it when we show up for it, when we're in it. We get that. I have a big chapter on being present and stillness is the key. I talk about Marina Abramovich and her presentation, The Artist is Present, where she just sat there and just was there, not doing anything, not working, not on her phone, not, she was just there for hours and hours and hours. And people came and sat in front of her and it was overwhelming and emotional and transcendent. It was the kind of things that Blake was talking about and Bon Iver was talking about. It just was wonderful. And that's what the present is.

11:13Even when the world is falling apart, even when what we know is coming up next is not great. Think about what the year could hold for us, the direction things are going. But as I play with my kids or I brush their hair, Or I was just in the swimming pool and I was looking up at the stars. You go, man, this is wonderful. I'm just going to be here in this, at this moment, soak it in. That's what Seneca talks about. You know, let me give you this other quote. I know I'm just quoting a bunch today, but it's one of my favorite quotes from Seneca. He says, snatch the pleasures your children bring. Let your children in turn find delight in you and drain joy to the dregs without delay.

12:02No promise has been given you for this night, he says. No, even that's too long. No promise has been given even for this hour. But this minute, the present you're in, whatever time span you're going to define the present, that has been given to you. You're in it right now. So actually be in it. Be in all of it. Be all the way in it. That's today's somewhat rambling message, and I'll leave you there. Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized. You can get them sent to a friend.

12:42The obstacle is the way. It goes the enemy. Stillness is the key. The leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic. We have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com. My family owns a 2023 Toyota 4Runner, and honestly, it's my favorite vehicle that I've ever owned. Around town, it's smooth and reliable, but where it really shines is on our trips into the backcountry. We've taken it on backpacking adventures to Colorado and New Mexico, loaded it up with gear, and never had to think twice about whether it could handle the terrain. That's what Toyota trucks are built for.

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