Help Them Be Better | Role Models

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1:29Welcome 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.

2:07Help them be better. One evening, Epictetus woke up to hear someone in his house. Walking towards the noise, he found a criminal had stolen the iron lamp he kept burning in a shrine in his front hallway. As always, Epictetus handled the situation with calmness and humor. Tomorrow, he said to himself, you will find an earthenware lamp, for a man can only lose what he has. But what if Epictetus had been awake when the man walked in? What if he'd caught the thief red-handed? Would he have beaten the criminal up? Would he have fought for his prized lamp, pressed charges after, demanded restitution?

2:41Actually, if we know anything about Epictetus, we can say confidently that the situation would have gone almost exactly as it did. To him, the theft was a reminder from fate that we don't truly possess anything. It was also a reminder we can guess that human beings, out of desperation or greed, do unvirtuous things. That is something we don't control, but we do control how we respond. We can imagine that Epictetus, that he caught the thief and gotten to talk to the man, might have responded as the bishop does so beautifully in Les Mis when he catches the thief and he says, take this stolen silver and use it to become an honest man.

3:17People will betray us in life they will take from us. We can be hurt and angry and broken about it, or we can use it as Epictetus did, as a reminder of the transient nature of possession. We can use it as an opportunity, as they did in that famous play, to be merciful, to let them think better of it, to forgive, as Marcus tried to do when he was betrayed by Avidius Cassius. We can get better, and we can try to make them better too.

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5:32Adoption was a widespread practice in Roman society, especially the senatorial class. and as a provision for imperial succession. Marcus Aurelius was himself the adopted son of the emperor Antoninus Pius, who himself was adopted by the emperor Hadrian so that Marcus could one day succeed them both to the purple. While Seneca was never adopted, his brother Novatus was, becoming Gaio, who in the New Testament refuses to press charges against St. Paul. But Seneca liked to look at the phenomenon of adoption the other way around, saying that we can always choose whose children we want to be. For him, Cato, the towering, resolute stoic who railed against Julius Caesar in defense of the Republic, was always standing by in his mind.

6:17The first book of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, in fact, is a catalog of all the people that Marcus had learned from and the lessons he had taken from their lives. So this week, take a minute to think of the models that you can follow, wise and admirable people that you can measure yourself against. And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal. We like to say that we don't get to choose our parents, Seneca said, that they were given to us by chance. Yet truly, we can choose whose children we'd like to be. That's in On the Brevity of Life. But then in Moral Letter, Seneca said, we can remove most sins if we have a witness standing by as we are about to go wrong.

6:57The soul should have someone it can respect, by whose example it can make its inner sanctum more involable. Happy is the person who can improve others, not only when present, but even when in their thoughts. I think for me, this idea of choosing whose children you want to be is great, right? Whether you had amazing parents or the world's worst parents, you can also choose to be the children of the greats of history. We did a Daily Dad email not long ago where Bruce Springsteen is talking about being an ancestor or a ghost. You know, who are the ghosts that haunt you and who are the ancestors that inspire you?

7:35And how can you choose to follow in the right footsteps? For me, Robert Greene is kind of an adopted father. He's about my father's age, but he's who I want to be as a person in many ways. professionally. He's deeply inspiring to me. The way even that he has spent so much time and energy and patience shaping me into the writer that I became, that in and of itself has been inspiring and is an example I try to follow in. So I've never met Marcus Aurelius. I'm not related to Seneca. I have no lineage that puts me back into ancient Rome with Epictetus, but we can still be the descendants of these people.

8:23We can still be their children. James Baldwin was famously talking to his nephew and he said, you come from steady peasant stock, people who built the railroads, people who escaped via the underground railroad, people who responded to the blows of fade in life with dignity and poise and creativity and perseverance. Now, is this literally true? Does he know for a fact about the railroads or the underground railroads? No. But we choose what tradition we hail from. We choose whose child we want to be by the example that we follow, by the heroes we give ourselves in our mind. And that's what today's entry is about.

9:01And I hope you take a minute to think about whose footsteps you're following in and what example you are setting so that perhaps someday someone else might choose to be adopted by you.

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