This Is How To Be Fearless | The Stoic Is A Work In Progress

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2:12Welcome 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.

2:53This is how to be fearless. The bravery of it, however much he discounts it, is almost incomprehensible. In 1961, James Meredith, a Black 27-year-old former Air Force Staff Sergeant, attempted to enroll at the University of Mississippi. What ensued was literally years of vicious intimidation, judicial malfeasance, protest unrest, and brutal violence directed at stopping Meredith from realizing his basic rights as an American citizen. Yet Meredith never stopped. He kept going back and back again, as we said recently, even after he was shot in the face by a shotgun-wielding racist and left for dead on the side of dusty Highway 51.

3:35Yet when people tried to compliment his courage, Meredith would wave them off. It's an insult to me, he said, to think that there's anything that would scare me. This was not hyperbole. Meredith had the kind of inner citadel that would have matched or exceeded even the greatest of the Stoics, your Cato's or your Stockdale's. As Malcolm Jones pointed out in an incredible article on Meredith, as the rioters tore Ole Miss to pieces, as firebombs exploded and as tear gas wafted through the air, as rifle shots and the National Guard attempted to restore order, James Meredith slept in his dorm room, calmly ignoring all the people who wanted to rip him from limb to limb.

4:14As it happens, there was a sort of stoic exercise that Meredith practiced to draw up his courage and calmness. He just imagined that he had already died. He thought of himself as already dead, meaning that he had nothing to fear from his enemies and from the mob. There was nothing they could take from him, nothing they could do to him in his mind. So he just kept going, didn't back down even when they literally almost did kill him. The Stoics put courage at the top of their list of virtues for a reason, yet they also saw it as inseparable from the virtue of justice. James Meredith, who is 90 years old now, is an inspiring, moving example of what happens when you combine these two virtues together, as the Stoics have for thousands of years.

4:55because knowing the right thing is only half the battle. You also need the courage to do it right now. That's the idea behind the new book, Right Thing Right Now. It's the idea of giving you a roadmap through stories like Meredith's of how to build a life, create change, action by action, step by step. They can stab you with knives and shower you with curses, Mark Surrealis writes in Meditations. But why should that stop you from acting with justice and courage? No one can stop you from that, he says in Meditations, because there's a fountain of goodness inside us, in the world. And it's up to each and every one of us to make sure that fountain keeps bubbling up, no matter how many obstacles they've thrown our way.

5:36We might not all be Cato's or James Meredith's, but we can each make the world a better place, a more fair place, a place ruled by love as long as we're willing to keep going back to that fountain within, as long as we're not too scared. And that's the idea in Courage is Calling, which is the first book in the Virtue series, is a now in Right Thing Right Now, which is the third book in the series. All the virtues are interrelated and interconnected, and we need more people to have all of them. And I'm really excited for you to check it out. You can get signed numbered first editions. You can even get some of the pages that I wrote when I was doing the book.

6:12You can get these manuscript pages, like one of my prized possessions is a page from the typewritten manuscript of Stephen Pressfield's Gates of Fire. There's a whole bunch of stuff. I'll even send you the intro to the book right now. You can grab that at dailystoic.com slash justice. Right thing right now. Good values, good character, and good deeds is coming out on June 11th, but it means so much to authors. If you pre-order the books, it helps support the whole sort of publishing ecosystem. So if you could grab one, that would mean so much to me. Thank you for listening, and I can't wait to hear what you think of the book.

6:47The Stoic is a work in progress. This is the May 17th entry in the Daily Stoic. Show me someone sick and happy, in danger and happy, dying and happy, exiled and happy, disgraced and happy. Show me, by God, how much I'd like to see a Stoic. But since you can't show me someone so perfectly formed, at least show me someone actively forming themselves so, inclined in this way, show me. That's Epictetus's discourses. Instead of seeing philosophy as an end to which one aspires, see it as something one applies. Not occasionally, but over the course of a life, making incremental progress along the way.

7:35Sustained execution, not shapeless epiphanies. Epictetus loved to shake his students out of their smug satisfaction with their own progress. He wanted to remind them and now you of the constant work and serious training needed every day. If we are ever to approach that perfect form, it's important for us to remember in our own journey to self-improvement that one never arrives. That the sage, the perfect stoic who behaves perfectly in every situation, is an ideal and not an end. And I'll actually give you a story about Epictetus in this very regard. Epictetus is in his house one night. He hears a noise.

8:12He walks down the hallway and he sees someone is broken into his house and stealing one of his lamps that he had burning in a shrine in his house to the Roman gods. And at first he's mad. At first he's upset. And then he says, you know what? No, actually the problem is me. Why did I have such an expensive thing that I was worried someone would steal? And he says, tomorrow I'm going to go and get an earthenware lamp. Basically, he says, I was in the wrong. I wasn't practicing the philosophy that I preached, the idea of practicing detachment, the idea of not being materialistic, and now I need to make an improvement.

8:50And that's what he went and did. And I think there's a bunch of things to take out of that story. We don't need to get into them. But I like the idea of Epictetus telling this story, which is how we hear about it, that he knew he himself was not perfect and that he knew that he himself had improvements and changes that he needed to make. I think this is another important way to read meditations, right? There's a reason that different passages hit differently and sometimes they feel like they contradict each other. There's a reason that even at the end, right, the passages have Marcus Aurelius sort of near death, we think, show an evolution of a person because he's evolving and changing.

9:24But there's also in those pages some frustration with himself that he's not there yet. He says, you've been studying this your whole life. You're an old man and you're not getting any better. So I guess I tell you all that to get you to understand that it's a journey, that none of us are perfect. We don't just get it, but it's something we work at. And I'm having this unique experience, right? I wrote The Daily Stoic in 2015. It came out in 2016. scene. That was like my 10-year point in my study of stosis. So I've been at it for 10 years. Here we are in 2024, some eight years after that, and I'm rereading it to do these weekly episodes.

10:03And you know what I see? I see sometimes that I disagree with stuff that I wrote in the book. I see ways that I would change it. I see things that I don't like. I see things that I wish I'd put in the book, different quotes that I wish I'd put in the book. Because I'm evolving as a writer, I'm evolving as a human being, and I'm evolving as a student of Stoicism, which we all should be. So it's important that we understand that Stoicism is a journey, not a destination, and that we're never going to be perfect. We're never really going to get there. But one of the things that Epictetus says, right, he says, you know, you're basically joking that you'll never be able to show him such a stoic.

10:42But he does say elsewhere that just because we despair of perfecting something doesn't mean we give up trying, right? That we're still trying to do it. We're trying to get closer to it. And just because we know we can't be perfect doesn't mean we can't be better. So that's the lesson in today's entry. And just to illustrate the idea, all the things that I just told you, those stories that I just told you, those are what I wish I'd put in the original book. But I didn't because I didn't fully know them or I didn't understand them or hadn't made the connection yet. So one of the things I'm trying to get better at as a writer is taking a little bit more time, understanding that the more time I give myself, the better the finished product will be.

11:25And anyways, I feel like I'm getting better. I feel like my understanding of stoicism has gotten better over the years. And I hope the same is true for you. Thanks everyone for listening. I hope you have a good weekend and I will talk to you again very soon.

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