We Can Never Not Be All Of Us

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2:28Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. And for more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

2:52We can never not be all of us. In book six of Meditations, Marcus Aurelius gives him and us a command to keep an important idea in mind. Meditate often, he writes, on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all the things in the universe. He is speaking of the Stoic concept of sympathia, the idea that, as Seneca wrote, all that you behold, all that comprises both God and man is one. We are all parts of one great body. Why should we think about this? What will it do? Well, to the Stoics, understanding how we are all connected and dependent on each other will prompt us to be good and do good for each other.

3:34Talking about the inspiration and making of the song Holy Fields, Justin Vernon from the band Bon Iver put it beautifully. We can never not be all of us. We are always sharing the moment we are in, the moment we are here living in time. And so it's really hard to separate and really truly try to decipher what one person really is because you don't really have one person without the other. And that to me, he said, is just like sacred math for figuring out all our problems as human beings. It's just understanding that there's always the other that we're kind of responsible for. We are part of an interconnected organism.

4:16You can't help another person without helping yourself. You can't harm another person without harming yourself. We are all parts of the same whole. We are all bees of the same hive, as Marcus liked to say. And this is why the Stoics believe that a good life hinges on justice, on being a good steward of the hive, of the common good. because you can never not be all of us.

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