It’s A Bad Use Of Your Creativity | Practice Letting Go

0:00I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$149 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$299 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

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1:18Welcome 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.

1:58It's a bad use of your creativity. It'd be impressive if it wasn't so painful, the way we're able to imagine all the terrible things that might happen, the vivid scenarios we concoct in our head, the extensive conversations we practice, the arguments we get into with people we've never met. Seneca talked about how our imaginations are almost more powerful than reality, real enough that they may well cause us more suffering than actual life. In a recent interview, the singer Jewel talked about realizing that this catastrophizing in her head, this anxiety and fear, what it really was was a bad use of creativity.

2:34She was using her considerable imagination and artistic skill not to make art, but to torture herself. We all do this. Instead of using our mind to solve problems, we set it to work on problems that don't exist. Instead of using it to move forward, we use it to look backward, poring over what already happened. Instead of using it to feel good, we use it to torture ourselves. And how crazy is that? And how counterproductive? You have been given an incredibly powerful tool, this brain and imagination of yours. But like a gun or a knife, it can just as easily harm the user as it can protect or serve them.

3:07We have to train and discipline ourselves. We have to direct these resources properly. We have to channel our creativity, not into fear and anxiety, but into purpose and progress. I actually have on my desk here, this is the anxiety fidget or coin that we made over at Daily Stoke. I'm someone who does that. I just, I'll realize, I just spend a whole bunch of time having a conversation in my head that doesn't exist for no reason, of no purpose. It only tortured myself. The other person isn't thinking about this at all. It was a bad use of my creativity. As Seneca said, he who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary.

3:42I tried to apply that creativity that I would ordinarily spend being anxious into making something that can help me with my anxiety. And we've sold a bunch of these people who've really liked it. I think they'll like it too. I'll link to it in today's show notes. It's awesome. It's got this hole in the middle. I kind of like to spin it between my thumb and my index finger. It's awesome. Check it out. I'll link to that in today's show notes. But mostly, try to use your anxiety. Try to use your creativity for good and not for bad to move forward and not backward.

4:19Practice letting go. 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 colleague Stephen Hanselman, who I also wrote the Daily Stoic with. You can actually get signed copies of the Daily Stoic Journal in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. Or we've got copies here at The Painted Porch, my bookstore in Bastrop, Texas. Always popular. People ask me to sign them all the time. Anyways, check out the Daily Stoic Journal. I'm on like my fourth year of doing it. You might like it as well. We suffer when we lose things we love, and we suffer most when we lose people we love.

4:59But it is a natural, unavoidable part of life. And the Stoics say that this suffering is increased by our belief that we possess the objects of our love. They are, as we like to say, a part of us. This belief doesn't increase our love or care for them, but rather is a form of clinging that ignores the simple fact that we don't control what will happen, not to our own bodies, let alone to the ones we love. Epictetus taught a powerful exercise that every time you wish a dear child or family member or friend good night, you remember that these things are like a precious breakable glass. Remember how dramatically things can change while you sleep.

5:37Marcus too struggled to practice this with his own family as he tucked them in at night. And the point wasn't to be morbid, but to recreate a sense of appreciation and a kind of humility. You cannot take anyone, especially someone you love, for granted. And then the quotes are from Epictetus in Seneca. Epictetus says, whenever you experience the pangs of losing something, don't treat it like a part of yourself, but as a breakable glass, so that when it falls, you will remember that and won't be troubled. So too, whenever you kiss your child, sibling, or friend, don't layer on top of the experience all the things you might wish, but hold them back and stop them, just as those who ride behind triumphant generals remind them that they are mortal.

6:19In the same way, remind yourself that your precious one isn't one of your possessions, but something given for now, not forever. That's Epictetus' Discourses 3.24. But the wise person can lose nothing. Such a person has everything stored up for themselves, leaving nothing to fortune. Their own goods are held firm, bound in virtue, which requires nothing from chance and therefore can't be either increased or diminished, Seneca, on the firmness of the wise. We did a Daily Stoic email recently that I wanted to read you, or a chunk of it. Let me pull it up here. It's actually a poem. You wouldn't think of Margaret Atwood, the author of Handmaiden's Tale and many other things, as a poet, but she has this beautiful poem called The Moment, and I think it captures what the Stoics are talking about here, and I'll read it because it's only three verses.

7:11The moment when after many years of hard work and a long voyage, you stand in the center of your room, house, half acre, square mile, island, country, knowing at last how you got there. And you say, I own this. In the same moment, the trees unloose their soft arms from around you. The birds take back their language. The cliffs fissure and collapse. The air moves back from you like a wave and you can't breathe. No, they whisper. You own nothing. You were a visitor time after time, climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming we never belonged to you. You never found us. It was always the other way around.

7:57I just think that's such a beautiful poem. And look, when there's a part of what Seneca here that stops me, he says, so that when the glass falls, you will remember that and won't be troubled. Now, I don't think that's quite right. We know that Seneca lost a child and grieved quite deeply. We know that his mother grieved him quite deeply when he was exiled, and he in turn grieved his mother. We know that he and his wife struggled at their parting when they were forced to commit suicide. The idea that the Stoic can just think these things and then not be attached to people, I think that's a false ideal.

8:36And I don't think that's where you actually want to get, even if you could get there. To me, what Epictetus has exercised, what Marcus is doing, and it's when I practiced almost every day during the pandemic, when especially in those dark early days when it seemed very, very serious. Not that it wasn't serious, but it seemed so much more uncertain, the seriousness of it. The idea of holding your children close and saying that you don't know what's going to happen through the night is there to make you breathe that moment in, to not rush through it, to not try to get it over with. So you can go check your email or watch Netflix or have a snack.

9:21It's to go, no, this is important. I'm not going to rush through this. I'm not going to get past it. I am going to breathe it in because it matters, because it's here now. To me, that this is a breakable glass doesn't mean put it up on the highest shelf, wrap it in bubble wrap and hope nothing bad ever happens to it. It's to appreciate it while you have it and to realize that you don't have it forever because none of us do. That's what I take from that exercise. And, you know, that was brought home to me even more during a year, almost a year exactly from, you know, March of 2020 when this freak storm hits Texas.

10:04And I, you know, everyone tucked their kid in at night. They lost power. And a few families woke up and found that their children or older family members had died in their sleep, had frozen to death in their sleep. It had gotten so cold so unexpectedly. you just think about how tragic that is and how that could happen to anyone. And you realize how much worse it would feel if you'd had an argument before bed, if you'd been short before bed, if you'd said, no, I said only two books, and now you want me to read a third one, right? you would regret that. It would be tragic in any circumstance. Again, the idea that you would get to a place where you would not care that it happened.

10:54I don't think that's right. Marcus Aurelius loses multiple children. That's insane, unthinkable. And even in meditations, you get the sense that he's still grieving, still working through it. So you don't get there, but you do hopefully get to a place where you can minimize the regrets. So you're not sitting there kicking yourself saying, I wish I'd been more patient. I wish I'd been there more, period. I wish I hadn't rushed through things. While I had them, I really loved them. I really connected with them. I wasn't detached from them. I was attached to them. And that's why this tragedy is the least bad version of how it could go.

11:33That's not the happiest way to leave you today, but I do think it's a powerful exercise and worth thinking about. And I'll talk to you soon.

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