This Is The Dead’s Day | 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.

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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.

2:25Yesterday was Halloween here in America, which is a fun holiday for children. It's full of masks and candy and staying up late. In Mexico, however, today is the beginning of Dia de los Muertos, a more adult and philosophical holiday. All throughout Mexico, people will gather not for treats, but to celebrate and remember their friends and family who have died. It is, in a sense, a three-day commemoration, the idea of memento mori, a kind of collective bereavement mixed with the fun of a jazz funeral. The great Montaigne, and if you haven't read his famous essays or Sarah Bakewell's How to Live, you must, he would tell a story that had trickled back to him from the new world of an ancient drinking game where the members took turns holding up a painting of a corpse inside a coffin and cheered, drink and be merry for when you are dead, you will look like this.

3:16And this cheeky but also profound observation captures the spirit of Dia de los Muertos as well, with its imagery of skulls and skeletons, the makeup, the music, the dancing, the praying, the altars set up to honor those who have left. It may seem strange to celebrate death in this way and stranger still to involve children in it, but is it really any stranger than banishing all thoughts of death from our lives and letting it return to us only as a dreaded nightmare? Or pretending that the one thing that is guaranteed to happen to all of us doesn't even exist? There is real value in taking time to process and grieve and dance with the morbidity of our mortality, of creating a ritual that allows us to come to terms with this essential part of our existence.

4:01Better to be on good terms with death and to schedule an annual checkup than to be surprised and shocked by this enemy we all share. So drink and be merry today and celebrate the day of the dead. say goodbye to the people you have lost and enjoy the people you are lucky enough to still have with you. That's all we can do. And that's what my Memento Mori coin on my desk is all about. And I always love when people show me theirs. I had Morgan Wade on the podcast. She pulled out her Memento Mori necklace. You know, that's what we've been talking about this month. And I hope you can grab one and check them out at store.dailystoic.com.

4:42Accepting what is. This is the November 1st entry from the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by me and my wonderful translator and co-writer and longtime agent, Steve Hanselman. Before we get into accepting, I have to accept that it is November. It's been so hot in Austin that it's felt like it's still summer and we're just getting to the point where, you know, it's starting to get dark much, much earlier. So I've kind of been living in this fantasy land where it was still summer. And then it's just like, boom, it's November. And I could wish it was otherwise.

5:17I could say, where did the time go where I can accept and I could transition. I'm about to leave. I'm in seven days. I'm heading to London, Rotterdam, and Dublin to do some talks. And then also Toronto and Vancouver. You can come see me, ryanholiday.net slash tour. There's still a few tickets left, but it's going to be like crazy through the end of the year for me. And I've got to accept that, which is what today's entry is about. I'll give you two quotes. We have both from Epictetus, one from the Inchiridion, one from Discourses. Do not seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather that everything happens as it actually will, and then your life will flow well.

5:58And then in Discourses, he said, It is easy to praise providence for anything that may happen to you if you have two qualities, a complete view of what has actually happened in each instance and a sense of gratitude. Without gratitude, what is the point of seeing? And without seeing, what is the object of gratitude? I am trying to think about this as I plan for this trip. I know it's going to be crazy. I know it's going to be one thing after another. I know a lot of it's not going to go my way. But on the whole, I got to be grateful that I'm even in the position. And two, the less I have, by the way, of expectations, the more I'm just happy to be there, excited, period, the more I can just enjoy it, however it goes.

6:41But as we riff in the book, let's say something happened that we wish it not. What is the easiest part of that to change, our opinion or the event that is past? Obviously, the answer is pretty straightforward. We accept what happens and change your wish that it had not happened. Stoicism calls this the art of acquiescence. That's a phrase from Epictetus. It's to accept rather than fight every little thing. And the most practiced Stoics take it a step further. Instead of simply accepting what happens, they urge us to actually enjoy what has happened, whatever it is. Nietzsche, many centuries later, coined the perfect expression to capture this idea.

7:23amor fati or love of fate. It's not just accepting, it's loving everything that happens. To wish for what has happened to happen is a clever way to avoid disappointment because nothing is contrary to your desires. But to actually feel gratitude for what happens to love it, this is a recipe for happiness and joy. And I think about that specifically when I'm traveling and I'm bringing my kids on this trip. The trip isn't flying there and arriving and then the fun part begins, right? The drive to the airport is part of the trip. The delays are part of the trip. The rude flight attendant is part of the trip, part of a thing that we can laugh at, have a memory about, come together about.

8:15Somebody getting sick, somebody getting lost, the events, which I hope will, which I'm working hard to make go well. Maybe there's a disaster back in Australia. You know, the fire alarms went off. It is what it is. And you accept it with a, with not, not so much a begrudging. Okay. But yeah. All right. Buckle up, man. This is what it is. And you smile about it. You enjoy it. You have fun with it. I can't always get there when I travel. I think the less I'm taking care of myself, like the more tired I am, the more hungry I am, the thirstier I am. Certainly this is true for the kids, the worse I do at it.

8:53But if I push myself to just accept my powerless over so much of it, but what I have the power over is my attitude about it, the story I tell myself about it, what I appreciate about it, my attitude of gratitude about it, well, then everything can go very well. So I'm going to go put my kids to bed. My laptop battery is about to die. It's still a lot of craziness left for me here on this Sunday night that I'm while I'm recording. But so I'll let you get to wherever you are going while you are listening to this, probably on your way to work or whatever. But that is what acceptance is about. And you can check out the Daily Stoic 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living anywhere books are sold.

9:35This is a cloth bound hardcover, but we've got a cool leather bound in the Daily Stoic store that will hopefully stand up a bit better. And you can grab that. I'll link to it in today's show notes. Talk soon.

9:49Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com slash email.

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