No Time Like The Present To Drink These Draining Seconds | The Most Secure Fortress

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: No time like the present to drink these draining seconds. It may not feel like it, but it's slipping away from you. It's slipping away from all of us. All of it. This period of our lives and our lives themselves. The present moment is an ephemeral thing, the ancients said. It was even an expression adapted from Virgil, Tempus fugit, or time flies. And it does, away from us. While we are anxiously fretting about the future or ruefully regretting the past, we are losing what is in front of us. The important conversations we aren't having, the changes we aren't making, the work we aren't investing in.

0:56Ryan Holiday: Seneca talked about how death is not something in the future, but something happening right now. We can't waste it. We can't let it pass us by. We have to live immediately, he said. We have to be here now. There is no time like the present, really, because there is no time but the present. These seconds are draining away, whether we use them or not. So use them. Have the conversation. Make the change. Do the work. Be here while you are still here.

1:35The Most Secure Fortress Remember that your ruling reason becomes unconquerable when it rallies and relies on itself, so that it won't do anything contrary to its own will, even if its position is irrational. How much more unconquerable if its judgments are careful and made rationally? Therefore, the mind free from passions is an impenetrable fortress. A person has no more secure place of refuge for all time. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 848. And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly, my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman.

2:21You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stokes store. But let's get on with today's reading. Bruce Lee once made an interesting claim. I fear not the man who has practiced 10 ,000 kicks once, he said. I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10 ,000 times. When we repeat an action so often it becomes an unconscious behavior, we can default to it without thinking. Training in the martial arts or combat is a deeply thoughtful study of movement. We sometimes think of soldiers as automatons, but what they've actually built is a steady patterns of unconscious behaviors. Any of us can build these.

2:59When Marcus says that a mind can get to a place where it won't do anything contrary to its own will, even if its position is irrational, what he means is that proper training can change your default habits. Train yourself to give up anger and you won't be angry at every fresh light. Train yourself to avoid gossip and you won't get pulled into it. Train yourself on any habit and you'll be able to unconsciously go to that habit in trying times. Think about which behaviors you'd like to be able to default to if you could. How many of them have you practiced only once? Let today be twice. Stoicism is linked to what they call cognitive behavioral therapy, which, as I understand, is one of the few forms of therapy that has demonstrably proven results.

3:45And I've done my share of it as well. The idea being that the mind has sort of patterns, loops that it goes into. And every time we do this, we're reinforcing the loop. And if it's a bad loop, every time we break it, we're training the opposite. So I think today's message is really thinking about how you've trained your mind, what you've practiced, what habits you've built in, what patterns you default to, and what do you need to work on, right? I think about what Dr. Frankel says when he says, you know, between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space, we choose how we need to be.

4:27But of course, that space is as big or as small as you've trained it to be, right? The person who can think, who can use that space is someone who's self-aware, who has some control over themselves. And the vast majority of people have no space because they've trained themselves that it's stimulus response, stimulus response, stimulus response, where you're just sort of emotionally reactive. That's, I don't think, how you want to live, even if it is how you are living. So today, I just want to leave you with this idea that you train the mind like any other muscle. You train yourself. My wife and I are working on this with one of our kids.

5:08Your kids do something. They knock something over. They do the opposite of what you ask them to do. They fight or kick. They do the things they do because they're kids. And then you have a response because you don't like it because it triggers something in you because you're worried about them because you don't want that glass to break, you know, whatever it is. And then the two of you or the three of you, you get in a loop. Families have patterns, too. There's also this sort of intergroup dynamic where this stuff happens. and it becomes a feedback loop. And we notice that our son does stuff to get attention, even though that's bad stuff that we don't want him to do.

5:42And so we're having to see, okay, when he does it, what's our response? Because we can't really control him, right? I mean, obviously you can control your kid. But what I mean is that our actions are much more in our control and have a greater influence than just how we try to force someone else to do something. So we're thinking about how do we create the incentives, How do we create the pattern or how at least do we not create disincentives or create the wrong pattern in how we react? We're trying to spend a lot of time being overly positive, really nice, give him lots and lots of attention so he doesn't do exactly what we don't want him to do to get attention.

6:19Just a little insight I've been thinking about as today's entry really hit me with that. And I'm sure some of you parents can relate. The idea is the patterns. What are you practicing? What loops are you stuck in? And then how can you get in good loops where you respond to things the right way? That's also what this is all about. And with that, I'll talk to you soon.