This Is How You Stay Intact | Accepting What Is

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0:55I'm recording this on a Monday and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$1.49 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$2.99 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

1:32Everything they sell has high standards to help you shop with confidence. Enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing.

2:08So let's get into it.

2:22This is how you stay intact. We can imagine people wanted things for Marcus Aurelius. They wanted jobs. They wanted favorable rulings. They wanted policy changes. They wanted his attention. We're not quite emperors, but people seem to want a lot from you too, don't they? Your boss does. Your kids do. The news wants your attention. Your neighbor wants your time. That group wants your money. Your spouse needs your affection. Your parents need your help. People need stuff from you. This is part of being human, but just as part of being a country or an empire means having borders, as humans, we have to have boundaries.

3:00We have to be able to be accessible as parents and employees and friends and offspring, but we can't give everything away. I talk a lot about this in Discipline is Destiny, which, by the way, is$2.99 as an e-book right now. You can grab it at dailystoic.com slash D-I-D. I'll link to it in today's show notes. We just can't allow ourselves to be run roughshod over. There's an Aristotelian mean here, a midpoint between the vices of closed-offedness and chaos, between appropriate and inappropriate. In the famous Rush song about being in the limelight, they sing about this.

3:36self-indice. Marcus Aurelius had to learn this. You have to learn this. What will you allow and not allow? Bear and not forbear? These are issues of boundaries. These are essential conclusions that you have to come to as a mature, self-sufficient, responsible adult. Marcus Aurelius understood that to rule effectively, he couldn't allow himself to be consumed by everyone else's demands. Without boundaries, without the discipline to protect those boundaries, you lose yourself in the chaos of other people's needs. Boundaries don't limit your capacity to help others. They preserve. Look, I would just say that maintaining healthy boundaries in your life requires discipline, lots of it.

4:16The ability to say no being one of the hardest ones that I struggle with. And it's really only through self-discipline and self-control are we able to achieve the greatness that lies inside each of us. And Discipline is Destiny, which was the second book in the Stoic Virtue series is all about that. And as I was saying, it's$2.99 as an ebook right now on Amazon. I do have some signed copies of the hardcover in the Daily Stoic store. I'll link to that also. But if you want the ebook, you can go to dailystoic.com slash DID or pull it up on Amazon. I'll link to it in today's show notes. Grab your copy.

4:49We could all use a bit more discipline in our lives, and hopefully it will help you fulfill your destiny.

5:04Accepting what is. This week's entry from the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 days of writing and reflections on the art of living. It's our companion to the Daily Stoic. Reinhold Niebuhr's serenity prayer is a mantra for many. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, it reads, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. The Stoics wanted to push past simply accepting what is. They wanted us to be grateful and happy with what is. Epictetus taught that we get a well-flowing life when we wish for what is going to happen, not for what we want to happen.

5:48And Marcus Aurelius adds that we should meet anything that comes our way with gratitude. Not, I wish this was different and I'll tolerate it, but I'm glad it happened this way. It's for the best. So let us try that on for size this week. And we have two quotes from Epictetus and one from Marcus Aurelius. Don't seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather wish that everything happens as it actually will, and then your life will flow well. That's Epictetus' Inchiridion 8. And then from the Discourses 1.12, he says, To be truly educated means this, learning to wish that each thing happens exactly as it does.

6:31Marcus Aurelius' Meditation 9.6, All you need are these, certainty of judgment in the present moment, action for the common good in the present moment, and an attitude of gratitude in the present moment for anything that comes your way. One thing I wanted to point out because I was fascinated to learn this is the serenity prayer. One, it sounds like some sort of real hymn or prayer that must go back thousands of years. Honestly, it sounds like something that could come from the Stoics. And then obviously a lot of people associate it with recovery movement, which it has become a big part of. but it really dates to like the 30s and 40s.

7:14They think that he composed the prayer somewhere around the time of 1932, 1933, which for some context is in the midst of the Great Depression. But again, one of the benefits of wisdom is that it is both timely and timeless at the same time. So this idea of the prayer, Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know one from another. Also, I think the difference between that as he first writes it and then what it sort of commonly gets rendered at is also a sign of, as Twain says, the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

7:56Just the perfect wording of it, the perfect encapsulation of the wisdom, it feels as soon as you see it, even though it's as old as some people's grandparents who are listening to this, or perhaps some people who are listening to this themselves. They may be well older than that short little prayer, but it feels as current and fresh and also as ageless and timeless. It's just about anything. But anyways, let's not nerd out too much on the history of the prayer. What I thought I would focus on today, because we've been talking about acceptance quite a lot here on the podcast, I tend to disagree a little bit with Epictetus.

8:34I find that Epictetus's life was so tragic and painful. His name literally means like enslaved. We know almost nothing about his family. We know nothing about his existence, except that he's born a slave. He has a cruel master who tortures him. He walks for a limp the rest of his life. And then after 30 years of slavery and eventually getting his freedom, Epictetus is exiled by a cruel emperor. So it is a hard life. But I find it striking that nowhere in Epictetus's writings does he really question whether any of it was right or fair, whether anything could be done about it. Now, you might say this is him reaching this sort of sage-like level of wisdom.

9:20And I think there's truth to that. I mean, who am I to question, obviously, such a great and brave and, you know, enduring spirit. But I guess, obviously, we live in a world now where people have more agency. And why do we have that agency? Because people were willing to fight for it and change. So obviously, the Stoics are mostly right that so much of what happens in this world is outside of our control. We should accept it, resenting it, crying over it, whining about it, simply wishing it was otherwise does not do anything. And then a lot of the things that I think this is referred to are things that you just, look, you were born five foot three instead of six foot three.

9:59That's just a reality. You're going to have to accept it, right? People in your family go bald. You're going to have to accept it, right? Your spouse turned out to be a jerk. They ran away with all your money, left you, broke your heart. It happened, right? That is true. But I just don't want Epictetus to be misinterpreted as some sort of rationalization or acceptance of profound injustices, including the injustices that Epictetus seemed relatively okay accepting, right? As they say, progress depends on the unreasonable man. I talk about this a little bit in the Courage book. We have to be accepting.

10:35We have to face unflinchingly the reality of our situation. But even as I read this paragraph that I have written, I would push back on it a little bit. And I do think it's important that we focus on what we're going to do about the situations that we find ourselves in. I feel like Epictetus could have done that a bit more himself. Still obviously a great man, better man than I. Certainly I could not have endured what he had endured. But it's just a thought today. And I want you to be okay pushing back and questioning things from the Stokes as well. They weren't perfect. They were products of their time.

11:09They were products of their own experiences. And we can challenge and debate and argue with them as long as we think we're getting them closer to what they actually mean, what the wisdom of the Stoics actually mean. And that's today's message.

11:27Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

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