What Gets The Best Part of Your Day? | Kindness Is Always The Right Response

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1:29Welcome 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 in to works.

2:09What gets the best part of your day? In those first moments you're awake, how do you decide to start this fresh day? By reaching for the phone for social media? We fill the sunlight hours with meetings, spending them all indoors. We wait until after school after a long stint at the office to try to spend quality time at home. We pick up a book for a few minutes. We close our eyes to sleep already tired, already fried. It's insane. Both Seneca and Marcus lamented at the quickness with which ambitious professionals will promise up all their time to the most trivial of work pursuits. Seneca talked about how philosophy gets the time left over, not the other way around.

2:51More, he said, was the fact that all the wisest people in the world have been unable to explain why we are so willing to waste our time giving it away to anyone who demands it from us. Marcus talked about treating philosophy as his real mother, not some guardian. He talked about getting up early and seizing the day, doing what nature and duty demanded of him, not what was easy or pleasurable. The novelist Philip Meyer, whose book, The Son, is an incredible read and actually just did a wonderful interview on the Daily Stoic podcast in the new studio, so you can check that out. He once said, you have to be careful about to what and to whom you are giving the best part of your day.

3:34Perfectly said. We get only so many hours in a day, so many days in a life. To what and to whom will we give them to? Philosophy, self-improvement, that has to be at the top of that list. So do our duties to the common good, to the people we love. You have to start the day off right. Start your life off right. Don't tell yourself you'll get to it later. Do the important stuff now. Do the hard stuff now. Be with the people who matter now, not later. Give it, give them the best part of your day. And do listen to the new interview with Philip Meyer. It just came out. You can actually watch a video version of it in the new studio at youtube.com slash daily stoic podcast.

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5:25Kindness is always the right response. This is the May 12th entry from The Daily Stoic. Kindness is invincible only when it's sincere with no hypocrisy or faking. For what even can the most malicious person do if you keep showing kindness, and if given the chance, you gently point out where they went wrong, right, as they were trying to harm you? This is Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 1118. What if the next time you were treated poorly, you didn't just restrain yourself from fighting back? What if you responded with unmitigated, sincere kindness? What if you could, as the Bible says, love your enemies and do good to those who hate you?

6:09What kind of effect do you think that would have? The Bible says that when you can do something nice and caring to a hateful enemy, it is like heaping burning coals on their head. The expected reaction to hatred is more hatred. When someone says something pointed or mean today, they're expecting you to respond in kind, not with kindness. And when that doesn't happen, they're embarrassed. It's a shock to their system. It makes them and you better. rudeness, meanness, cruelty, these are a mask for deep-seated weakness. And kindness in these situations is only possible for people of great strength.

6:50You have that strength. Use it. I read a book recently, not recently, maybe six, seven months ago, about a book by James Peck, who was one of the Freedom Riders. In fact, the book is called Freedom Rides. And I think we We accidentally ordered a bunch of copies for the painted portion. I think we still have some, so check it out if you want to. But it's his memoir. James Peck was one of the few white freedom writers, one of the early white participants in passive resistance to the horrendous injustice that was segregation in Jim Crow in the American South. And in the book, he talks a handful of times about when he's being beaten.

7:33He's attacked on these different occasions. and how in the middle of being beaten or bullied or attacked or whatever, he would often say something to the person attacking him. He'd ask them a question or he wouldn't respond to an insult. He'd say something nice. And that how often this was a record scratch moment. In some cases, it would shake the person out of their spiral of rage and hatred because they just expected to get nastiness back. And when they didn't, it almost, it didn't always work, of course, but it was like, whoa, what am I doing? Who is it? It's kind of like reminded them, oh, this is a human being I'm about to do this to, not this abstraction that I've projected all this stuff to.

8:18Nonviolence, of course, is the highest expression of this sort of biblical wisdom, the Christ-like suggestion of turning the other cheek. It's extraordinarily difficult to do. So, you know, the people in the civil rights movement, they didn't just hear about this once and then magically become these saints. There was real training. One of the amazing stories, and I tell this actually in the new book, there's a scene where Martin Luther King is attacked on stage as he's speaking to a large leadership conference in the civil rights movement. And he's being beaten by this Nazi, a literal member of the American Nazi Party.

8:55And the crowd watches like, is he going to fight back? Is he going to lift his hands to protect themselves? And they note the incredible discipline in which Martin Luther King drops his hands, like actually makes himself less defended. And again, that was a lifetime of training and meditation and planning and experience that gets him. And they're not unlike the training that a special forces operator would have under fire. And then when the person is apprehended, Martin Luther King insists that he not be hurt. He takes him to a back room, not to beat the crap out of him, not to neutralize this threat, which Malcolm X would say he ought to have done.

9:38But he has like a pleasant conversation with him. And again, that's a record scratch, like the amount of discipline that that takes. I'm not asking that of you because I'm not sure I could give it myself. But Seneca's point that, look, everyone we meet is an opportunity for kindness. But to see these moments when we're provoked, when we're attacked, when we are treated unfairly, when we are abused, that makes the kindness all the greater, all the more impressive. And I want you to see that not as a weakness, but as a part of those disciplines of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. Martin Luther King realizes that, you know, blacks and believers in racial equality in the United States were hopelessly outnumbered, that the forces of segregation in many cases had control of the police and the military, and that it was insane to try to fight that violence with violence.

10:37So he decided to treat it instead with kindness, with grace, with forgiveness, with discipline. And in the end, it was the only thing that made a difference. I'm not perfect at this. I respond to provocations and insults and attacks. It's never really to my benefit. I almost always regret it. It's not the kind thing to do. It's easy to have a comeback. It's easy to dunk on the idiot who's attacking you. It's therapeutic and cathartic even, but it doesn't help us move forward. It's not a great look. It certainly doesn't change their mind. So let's focus today on meeting everyone and everything with kindness, especially, particularly unkindness.

11:25Let's meet that kindness with unkindness, see what kind of difference it makes. Let's see who it stops short and whose attention it catches.

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