This is Something Ryan Holiday Is Forever Grateful For

0:04Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

0:43Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just read this book. It's sort of funny how books can pop into your life, but this book inspired what I'm going to talk about today as we get some access to certain things through The Painted Porch. And someone on our staff, Peyton, who works at the front desk of the bookstore, read this book and she recommended and I read it because my son loves books like this. I don't think any of them would have realized that it would have put me in sort of this headspace, that this is what I would have been thinking about, but it inspired me to sort of put this down and it's what I wanted to talk about and riff on with you today on what I guess is almost to the day, the five-year anniversary of COVID.

1:30It's not something I would say I'm glad happened, right? I wouldn't want to dismiss the tragedy or the disruption or the loss, But when I think about this period five years ago, March and April of 2020, and I think about my life shutting down for the pandemic, what I feel is actually a sense of gratitude because I see how it changed me. I see what it taught me. I see the trajectory that it put me on. I remember we had just begun construction on the bookstore. I remember I have this sort of vivid memory of just recording some intros to episodes for the podcast here in the building, but it was so echoey.

2:08It was so empty that it didn't work. I had to find like a bathroom to go into to reduce the echo. That just feels so, so insanely far from now. But when I say I feel gratitude for that period, I'm not talking about the resurgence of stoicism that came from the troubled years that would ensue. Although that's obviously been fascinating and exhilarating and good for business in some senses. It was very bad for business, you know, when you're trying to open a bookstore and the world falls apart. But then Stoicism and the day of Stoic, when people spend so much time on social media, blew up in a way that I couldn't have anticipated.

2:49But no, what I'm talking about is how deeply those strange, quiet months where I was forced to slow down and stay put, how they recalibrated what I value, what I prioritize, what I wanted my life to look like. So in March of 2020, as the social distancing and the lockdowns started, my wife, Samantha, and my two young boys, they were both under three at that time, we settled into our ranch here in Bastrop County. And we bought it in 2015. We spent most of our time there. But suddenly we were living there in a way that we'd never lived there before, living there without the commutes, without the daily trips to the store, without my weekly trips to the airport.

3:32Part of why we picked that place is how easy it got me to the airport. And there were no more waking up in hotel rooms. There was no more time apart. We would spend literally hundreds and hundreds of days together in a row. And we did that in a way that I don't think I've ever spent in one place or with anyone all in my life. My family traveled a lot as a kid. My parents were busy. I was busy. And I was never so free from the mental load of it all, the cycle of logistics and scheduling and planning and packing and worrying about where I would be next and then transitioning back to being at home.

4:11And that stuff that keeps you from being fully present. Because, look, there's no such thing as parental leave in my line of work. And I think like a lot of driven people who work for themselves, I don't think I would have taken the time off even if there was. Instead, I just have worked constantly for most of my career, most of my kids' young lives. I was always accepting and chasing opportunities, even though, as I said, it meant those nights in hotel rooms and on airport benches. And then there's the fact that as a writer, even when you're home, you're not always there because you are mentally somewhere else.

4:47But suddenly, every single day, rain or shine, I was there. I was taking my boys for a long walk in the morning. We did their nap in the running stroller or the bike trailer. In the evening, we walked again as a family on our property. We got in the pool together almost every day. We read books. We ate all our meals together. I never missed a bath time or a bedtime. You know, I tried to calculate how many miles I would have walked on our dirt roads. And it was in the thousands and thousands. I think about how much time we spent in the woods, all the sunrises and the sunsets. I think about how many blackberries we picked, how many fish we caught.

5:22And again, look, I understand this is all very privileged, especially compared perhaps to your experience. I understand that many people had it quite badly. And I'm not just referring to the immunocompromised here. You know, my sister spent the pandemic in a small apartment in Brooklyn and my grandmother spent it in a nursing home. And we had friends who were doctors and paramedics. We had soldiers who were called up into the National Guard and spent a good chunk of the pandemic deployed. And I know that plenty of other people had to work in warehouses and places and conditions they shouldn't have had to.

5:54And others lost their livelihood entirely. So I get that this was privilege. And that's my whole point. I'm saying I see myself as being incredibly lucky. I was lucky that I got to see my home in a new way. One thing that struck us in those early months was how beautiful that first spring was, how new it was. It's like we had never once in five years spent enough days in a row at home that we could actually track spring happening, that we could watch the trees go from buds to leaves to a cool, lush forest. And, you know, we'd missed blackberry season most years. We'd get home after golden hour most days.

6:41we just took our kids to an outdoor performance the nutcracker they had a snow cone and then uh they went insane in the car ride home and one of the things i try to remind myself when that's happening is that i don't control my kids behavior especially when they're too far gone like that but i do control how i respond right that's stoicism but it's also what dr becky talks about Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr.

7:17Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being.

7:59And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

8:13But now, you know, we noticed stuff, those small daily transformations, the subtle shifts of light through the window, the sounds of birds we've been too busy to even see. And so the book I was telling you about, the one that I read at Peyton's recommendation, it's by Chloe Dalton, and it's this book called Raising Hair. And Dalton is this ambitious, connected political advisor, and she finds herself during the pandemic in an old house in the English countryside. And one day she comes across a leverette. I think that's how you pronounce it, but it's basically a wild baby hair. And she nurses it back to life.

8:45And what ensues is a surreal and moving friendship, where it becomes this kind of free range companion, hopping around her house, snoozing by her side, running in from the fields when she calls it, drumming softly on the couch to get her attention. It even gives birth and raises babies inside her home. And these are not particularly well-known or well-understood animals. In fact, they're largely ignored. So Dalton has to read not just these research papers, but poetry and ancient authors just to find out what they're supposed to eat. And she spends hundreds of lonely, quiet hours with this rabbit, which she never names.

9:21and she learns to understand its habits and its needs. And she sees the words from its umwelt, which is one of my favorite words, in addition to her own. And she came to see her home and the countryside that she lived in differently too. She says, I felt a new spirit of attentiveness to nature, no less wonderful for being entirely unoriginal. For as old as it is as a human experience, it was new to me. And for many years, she says, the seasons had largely passed by. My perceptions of the steady cycle of nature were disrupted by travel and urban life. She says she had observed nature in broad brushstrokes, in primary colors at a surface level, but mostly she'd just been interested in whether it was dry enough to walk or warm enough to eat outside.

10:08She said, I could only identify a small handful of birds or trees by name. She hadn't observed the buds unfurling, the seasonal passage of birds, the unshakable rituals and rhythms of life in a single field or wood. She said, I now marveled at the purple tinge on the black feathers of a house martin, the smallest creature she'd ever seen, which, as it flies in one morning, she sees the gleam of the sun on the mirror finish of its feathers. And I related to that because I spent 2018 and 2019 working on my book Stillness is the Key, and one of the main characters of that book is Churchill, whose own relationship with time and the natural world was changed by his love of painting, which he had discovered in the midst of a nervous breakdown after World War I.

10:52He was introduced to painting by a sister-in-law who sensed that Churchill was this kettle of stress, and she hands him a children's paint set. And in his book titled Painting as a Pastime, Churchill would speak eloquently of the way that painting, like all good hobbies, taught him to be present. The heightened sense of observation of nature, he writes, is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint. He had lived for decades on planet Earth, consumed by his work and his ambition, but through painting, his perception and perspective, it grew sharper. And he was forced to slow down.

11:28He sets up his easel, he mixes his paints, he waits for them to dry. He sees things that he previously had just blown past. And I had just finished a very busy tour for stillness when the pandemic hit. I'd actually crossed through the Venice airport in late January on the day that those two Chinese tourists arrived from Wuhan to later identify to some of the earliest COVID cases. I thought that I knew what stillness was, but the world was about to teach me real stillness. Because for many of us, the pandemic brought everything to a screeching, unprecedented stop. It stripped everything down, it broke it apart, and it made so much of our normal lives, work in personal unsafe, if not impossible.

12:09Suddenly I wasn't having to get on this plane. I wasn't having to battle traffic. I wasn't having to prepare for this talk or that one. There were no meetings. There were no dinners. There were no get togethers. There was no pressing deadlines. There could not be. But for all this took from us, Dalton explains, it also gives us the privilege of an experience out of the ordinary. And yet what did most of us do with this experience, you know, we complained about it. We resented it. We focused on what was missing. We agitated for things to go back to normal as if the way things were was how they were supposed to be.

12:42Because of some health issues in our household, because we had the physical space, because I had financial comfort, because my in-person work was certainly not essential, I just didn't want to be responsible for getting people together and getting them sick. So even when the speaking and the meetings came back, I was just not interested. I said, no, thanks. I don't want to be a part of that. It was not cheap. It cost quite a bit, but I felt like it was the right thing to do. And so we continued our social distancing, our sort of slower life, longer than most people did. I turned down most work travel.

13:16I declined most social obligations. And we let our employees keep working remotely. And it was one of the best decisions I have ever made. As I said, not cheap, but one of the best, because I really grew as a parent, as an equal parent. I got in a lot of reading and writing and running. And as I said, I really grew to love where I lived. And as Dalton writes in her book, she experienced that same thing. She says, how glad I am that I did not leave for the city the moment it was possible. I am grateful for every additional day that I gazed out the window. If I had gone, I would not have seen the leverets born.

13:52I would not have built the relationships I formed around the hair with other people and with this patch of land and felt this unexpected, uncomplicated joy and learned not to tamp down the emotions it generates in me. I would not have looked at my life from a different perspective, she said, and considered both what more I might be and things I might not need. Whereas before I had sought out exceptional experiences and set myself against the crowd. I take comfort in the fact that this process of self-discovery has been felt by millions before me. And I would include myself in the before and the after of that, right?

14:28I just feel so grateful for something like 500 consecutive bedtimes with my boys. I'm grateful for the road trips we took. I'm grateful for the projects we worked on together as a family, including the bookstore and the boy who would be king and the girl who would be free. The boy who would be king was one of the first things I worked on in those early days with pandemic. I'd had this idea for doing a kid's book about Mark Seuss, but I never had the time. And it was just, I had a captive audience and I workshopped it every night with my son. I'm grateful for the things it forced me to notice, for the work I had to do on my marriage.

15:00I'm grateful that it forced me to confront the reality that there are many things I don't have to do. If you had asked me in January, 2020, if I could survive professionally and personally without travel, without events or dinners or get togethers, I'd have said no way. But as it turned out, it was not only rewarding, but immensely productive in every sense, because clearly those things I thought I had to do, I didn't have to do. And as it turned out, I do better work when I don't do them. And I'm also grateful for what it taught me about human nature, about history, about adversity, about mortality, about our obligations to each other.

15:33I'm grateful that it didn't radicalize me or turn me into an unfeeling and cruel person, what Marcus Aurelius would refer to during the Antonine Plague as the real pestilence. In fact, I don't think I noticed that Meditations was a plague book until the pandemic, and I'm grateful to have learned that. It enriched my understanding of this philosophy that I get to talk to you about. I'm grateful that it showed me what I needed to be most grateful for, my own health, my family, the present moment. I'm grateful that it taught me how easy it can be to take many of the things about our lives for granted that other people don't share and would count themselves incredibly lucky to have.

16:11I'm grateful in the end for what I think you can safely say is the most radical lifestyle experiment in human history. I'm grateful that I survived the experiment. In the early days of the pandemic, I wrote this note to myself. I said, 2020 is a test. Will it make you a better person or a worse one? And that's the test that I reminded myself of over and over again. Will it make you a better person or a worse one. And in the process, the difficult process, the intervening five years, I think I came to understand what Stockdale was talking about when he described seeking to make his captivity the defining event of his life, which in retrospect, I would not trade.

16:54And that's how I feel about those five years. Do I wish they hadn't happened? Of course. Would it have been better for everyone if they hadn't happened? Were they preventable in so many ways? Of course. Do we need to explore why they happened and the failings that happened along the way. Also, of course, but I don't control most of that. I control who I am because of it. That's what I was trying to say on that note. I consider if I become better or worse because of it. I control what I took out of it. I control how I was changed by it. And I'm grateful for the changes that I made. I'm grateful for this platform, which exploded in size during that pandemic.

17:28Maybe that's how you first came to Stoicism or the Daily Stoic. And I'm grateful for that too. And that's what I wanted to riff on today. And so I'll conclude. Thanks to Peyton for passing me Raising Hair, which I read on spring break with my kids and really loved. We carry it in the painted porch. Definitely a great book. As I said, it reminded me of Churchill's book, Painting as a Pastime, as well. I have a big stack of books about animals that I keep at my house, and that book's going right there on the pile. And that wraps up today's episode. Thanks, everyone.

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