This Is A Most Dangerous Attitude | Don’t Hide From Your Feelings

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1:43Welcome 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.

2:23This is a most dangerous attitude. It's hard to keep a Stoic down or hold them back. They push through. They see obstacles as opportunities. They are not deterred by difficulties or criticism or friction. Like the old motto of the Royal Air Force, the Stoics believed that perseverance and determination were key. Per ardua ad astra, goes the motto, through adversity to the stars. This way of thinking makes someone a winner. It makes them a great leader. It can also make them dangerous to themselves and others. The author S.C. Gwynn, who was recently on the Daily Stoic podcast, he talked about this on the show and in his fascinating new book, His Majesty's Airship.

3:06He explained how when it came to experimental aircraft, the attitude of press on regardless was courageous, but it was also responsible for countless crashes and countless deaths. And this is true in life. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor. Sometimes it takes more courage to ask not if one could push through a problem, but if one should push through a problem. Sometimes we need to take difficulties as feedback or a warning. Sometimes we need to slow down or turn around. Sometimes we need to consider the crew flying with us or the larger mission, not just completing the task in front of us.

3:46We need the discipline not just to charge ahead, but the discipline to stop, the discipline to plan, the discipline to live to fight another day in better weather conditions after the repairs have been made, after everything has been checked out.

4:07Don't hide from your feelings. This is today's entry in the Daily Stoic. And our quote today is from Seneca in his essay to Helvia, his mother. It's better to conquer grief, he says, than to deceive it. We've all lost people we're close to, a friend, a colleague, a parent, a grandparent. And while we were suffering from our grief, some well-meaning person did their best to take our mind off of it or make us think about something else for a couple hours. However kind these gestures are misguided. The Stoics are stereotyped as suppressing their emotions, but their philosophy was actually intended to teach us to face, to process, and deal with emotions immediately instead of running from them.

4:51Tempting as it is to deceive yourself or hide from a powerful emotion like grief by telling yourself and other people that you're fine, awareness and understanding are better. Distraction might be pleasant in the short term by going to the gladiatorial games as a Roman might have done, but focusing is better in the long term. That means facing it now. Process and parse what you are feeling. Remove your expectations, your entitlements, your sense of having been wrong. Find the positive in the situation, but also sit with your pain and accept it. Remembering that it is a part of life. And that is how we conquer grief.

5:29I had Kate Bowler on the podcast last year, year before. I know it's been twice, but she has this book called Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Been Told. And the point, she finds out she has cancer and all these people come and go, oh, it happened for a reason. Everything happens for a reason. And her response was, I'd love to know the reason, right? And she was rejecting these sort of platitudes that we give people when they are grieving to try to take their mind off it. We distract them. We want to make them laugh. We say, oh, I've been through that too. There's no way out but through feeling, thinking, dealing with, you know, the Stoics knew grief.

6:13As Seneca was writing that essay to his mother, he was grieving himself. He'd lost a child. As I've been going back through meditations, we have this leather bound edition, and I'm rereading it like a fresh copy. And for whatever reason, I was just skipping through. And I found all the different instances where Marcus was talking about loss and children, which is extra haunting when you think about how many he lost, five, six. We don't know exactly, but almost more of his children did not survive to adulthood than did. He buried five, six children, just the magnitude of that grief. And if we take meditations, then as a much more personal book, a book of a man working through his grief, trying to conquer it, not deceive it, it's both very humanizing and haunting at the same time.

7:10And Marcus isn't different than you and I. He's not this magical robot, but he was someone who put in the work to deal with, to think through, to talk about his emotions. I just, I hate the stereotype of the Stoics as being unfeeling. They were feeling, they just tried not to be overwhelmed, overcome, paralyzed by those feelings. And part of the way they did it was by working on them. So, you know, this month in the Daily Stoic is about death and grief and mortality. And I think it's important for those of you who are grieving, for those of us who are grieving, who have lost someone or may lose someone, you know, it's okay to cry about that.

7:51There's a story about Marcus crying about the loss of one of his tutors. That's a human thing. If you're still crying about it, paralyzed by it a year later, you should probably get some help. You're probably torturing yourself. You're probably doing something that they, the person you are mourning, would not dream of wanting or cursing you with. So you've got to deal with it. You've got to face it. You've got to process it. That's the only way out. There is no way out but through. That's today's message from The Daily Stoic. And I hope you guys are getting ready for the holidays. I hope you're thinking about your New Year's resolutions.

8:30we've got the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge coming up here very very soon so stay tuned for that and happy holidays we'll talk soon thanks so much for listening if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show we appreciate it and I'll see you next episode

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