It’s A Very Special Thing | We Can Work Any Way

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2:00Welcome 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, and 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.

2:41It's a very special thing. How many books have been published since the time of Zeno? hundreds of thousands, millions. We know that Chrysippus, a later scholar of the Stoic School, himself wrote something like 700 little books and essays. How many books of philosophy, how many memoirs, how many books of self-help, how many books on leadership have there been through the centuries? Literally too many to even estimate. And yet meditations stands more or less alone from them all. Nearly every other book was written to be published, even the diaries and journals, which meditations is sometimes described as, even these books of other famous or powerful people are far more about what those people were doing or were written with some kind of affect, hoping to be seen by later generations.

3:30David Hernandez de la Fuente, a Spanish classicist and translator of meditations who had a great recent episode on the Daily Stoic podcast, he explains that meditations was not conceived for us to read, but rather as the vehicle that this cultured man who had a contemplative attitude found to question himself. In other words, it was a book for the author and not for the reader. What we see in meditations is not the finished product of a philosopher, but the process of philosophy. We are watching Marcus Aurelius philosophize to himself about right and wrong, about his temper, about his fears, about death, about power, about the meaning of life in a dark and a painful world.

4:10In Pierre Hadeau's fascinating book on meditations called The Inner Citadel, he describes this as a series of spiritual exercises. Philosophy then wasn't a thing that Marcus Aurelius read or wrote about. It was a thing that he did that just happened to manifest itself into a book that survived after his death. This makes meditations a remarkable and peerless work. It makes it authentic and raw. It somehow manages to make an otherwise utterly inaccessible life. That of a Roman emperor makes it accessible to generation after generation, even thousands of years later. He'd probably be mortified to know that we are reading it, would have written and edited it very differently if he knew people would ever see it.

4:53It's like we get to eavesdrop on one of the world's greatest singers giving the most earnest performance of their lifetime totally to themselves. To not avail yourself of this work, to not dip in and out of its accidental wisdom is crazy. History and circumstances have blessed us beyond comprehension. Let's not let it go to waste. And by the way, if you're thinking about reading meditations, you're not sure what translation to get. I mean, first off, we have an awesome one. We have the one that I use every day in the Daily Stoic store. I'll link to that. But we did this cool course for Daily Stoic where we really broke sort of a book club of meditations.

5:31If you're thinking about reading it, you don't know where to start. I think this is the place to start. And you can grab that in today's show notes. I'll link to that. You'll find it in the Daily Stoic store. And then just as a reminder, if you want to get the Daily Stoic Meditations course, and in fact, all our courses and challenges for free, you can sign up right now for Daily Stoic Life, which includes that and a bunch of other awesome stuff. So you can do that all in one swoop, dailystoiclife.com.

6:04Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. It is August 2nd. I can't believe it's already August 2nd, and I am holding in my hands the Daily Stoic, 366 meditations on perseverance, wisdom, and the art of living. You can grab a premium leather edition. You can grab signed editions at store.dailystoic.com. And the entry for today, we can work anyway. Indeed, how could exile be an obstacle to a person's own cultivation or attaining virtue when no one has ever been cut off from learning or practicing what is needed by exile? Mussonius Rufus lectures. Mussonius Rufus is Epictetus's philosophy teacher, and he was exiled at least three times.

6:45We'll get into that. But the entry for today begins as such. It says, late in his life after a surgery, Theodore Roosevelt was told he might be confined to a wheelchair for the remainder of his days. With his trademark cheeriness, he responded, all right, I can work that way too. And this is how we can respond to even the most disabling turns of fate, by working with whatever room is left. Nothing can prevent us from learning. In fact, different situations are often opportunities for their own kind of learning, even if they're not the kinds of learning we might have preferred. Musonius Rufus, for his part, was exiled three times.

7:19There's a theory that it was actually four times, twice by Nero, once by Vespasian. But being forcibly expelled from his life and home didn't impinge on his study of philosophy. In a way, he responded by saying, all right, I can work that way too. And he did, managing to squeeze in some time between exiles with a student named Epictetus and thus helping bring Stoicism into the world. In fact, that's not the only way. I'm going to grab this because there's a chapter on Musonius Rufus in Lives of the Stoics. And there's this great story about one of his exiles that I loved. Okay, so I say, it was there that Musonia sat some 700 miles away from home, wondering if he needed to follow his own advice and courageously wait for death.

8:01Why didn't he kill himself, as he had suggested to Thrasia? That's another stoic who had stared down Nero. He had reminded Thrasia that there is no reason to choose a heavier misfortune if we can make do with the one in front of us. We can train ourselves to be satisfied with the difficulties fortune has chosen to give us. Besides, Masonius believed he still had living to do. One who by living is of use to many, he said, has not the right to choose to die unless by dying he may be of use to more. That was, of course, how Seneca and Thrasia ultimately went out. Their example, their defiance, their heroism was of use.

8:35They didn't just commit suicide out of despair. So Musonius lived and he studied, as we must, as long as it was in his control to keep doing so well and for the greater good. The island where he was exiled was a dry, harsh place that today is unpopulated, but Musonius seized every opportunity that he could to live by his teachings and to be of use to the people around him. According to one source, he discovered an underground spring on the island, earning him the eternal gratitude of some of his fellow residents, most of whom were also political exiles. It is clear that he believed that exile was not evil or a hardship, but merely a kind of test, chance to move closer to virtue if one so chose.

9:14So he did, rededicating himself to teaching and writing, playing advisor to the philosophers and dignitaries who visited him from across the Mediterranean. Another exchange captures Musonius' fighting spirit there on the island. We're told that Demetrius the Cynic, who had been with Thrasia during his last moments, encountered Musonius bound in chains and digging a pickaxe on a chain gang for one of Nero's canals. Does it pain you, Demetrius? Musonius was said to reply, if I dig the isthmus for the sake of Greece, what would you have felt if you saw me playing the lyre like Nero? The dates on this encounter make it hard to trust as the canal was being constructed during the time of his confinement, but these stories nevertheless give us an insight into the reputation of Musonius' character.

9:56Whether he was providing for thirsty islanders or digging a canal for the benefit of Greece, the hardship of exile was not enough to break the will of a true philosopher. But what of all the comforts he was deprived of? Musonius chose to think about what he still had access to, the sun, the water, the air. When he missed the amenities of Rome, friends, or the freedom of travel, he reminded himself and his fellow exiles that when we are home, we did not enjoy the whole earth, nor did we have contact with all men. And then he got back to spending his time in exile, doing what he did best, finding opportunities to do good.

10:28Because for the Stoic, the chance is always there, even in the worst of circumstances, is as bad as exile or any adversity is, can make you better if you choose. And so look, this is the idea of this entry in the Daily Stoic, that it doesn't matter what happens, you can find a way to work with it, you find something to do with it. And I think it's important, look, the Stoics saying this thing is one thing, but it's that they lived it, it's that they acted with it, it's that they did it in real exile, not hypothetical exile, that gives us so much to point to and to be inspired by and to try to live up to.

11:02You can check out Lives of the Stoics. Of course, you can grab Daily Stoic, but Lives of the Stoics, I'm really proud of because it's not what the Stoics said, it's what they did. Grab a signed copy at store.dailystoic.com or come grab one at the Painted Porsche, the Stoic Pokile, which is a bookstore named after where Zeno founds Stoicism himself having a similar experience working with, washing up in Athens, penniless, and ending up in a bookstore.

11:29thanks so much for listening to the daily stoke podcast if you don't know this you can get these delivered to you via email every day check it out dailystoke.com email