It’s About What You Make Happen

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1:04Welcome 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.

1:31It's about what you make happen. We don't live in ancient Rome. We're not emperors or senators. We are not professional philosophers. We are regular people. This doesn't mean we are far from the world of virtue, however, from the questions and dilemmas of Marcus Aurelius or Cato. We tend to think of moral choices, William Lee Miller writes in his incredible biography of Abraham Lincoln, as those that life forces upon us, quandaries, perplexities, choices among goods and evils that we cannot evade. And we also tend to think of such choices as concentrated in a moment or a short period of time. The lifeboat is sinking and someone must be thrown out into the sea.

2:13So shall I throw out Albert Einstein or my own grandmother? That is the stuff, he says, of ethical cases in academies. He's talking about the same preconceptions that many of us have when we hear about the word justice. Justice? I'm not a judge. I don't pass laws. I didn't come up with this standard practice in my industry. But that's not what justice was to the Stoics, not to the high and mighty like Marcus or the lowly like Epictetus. No, to them, justice was what a person did. It was how they lived. It was not big dilemmas or paradoxes. It was everyday decisions. It was what they chose to make happen in their own sphere.

2:50That's what the new book, Right Thing Right Now, tried to focus on. You can grab that, by the way. Hope you check it out. You can get the audio also. But the idea, and I talk about Lincoln in the book, is that although Lincoln was a brilliant philosopher and thinker, he was for most of his life just an ordinary lawyer and rural politician. But then he decided to get involved, not on the global stage, but in the issues around him. There are also those latent possibilities lying all around us all the time if we bestir ourselves, Miller writes. Lincoln, in 1854, bestirred himself. Abstractly, slavery was a moral abomination.

3:27In reality, it was a political and economic problem. Lincoln chose to speak up about it. He chose to get involved. It just so happened that from this small bestirring, the whole world was changed. And by the way, you should grab William Lee Miller's book. It's amazing. And then if you haven't read Right Thing right now, I think you would like it. You can grab it right now. We still got some signed copies at store.dailystoic.com and at The Painted Porch. I'll link to both those in the show notes. And thank you to everyone who helped make that book a number one bestseller. That was a very unexpected surprise, and I appreciate it so much.

4:29We'll see you next time.

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