What Matters Is What You Can Do In The Moment | Check Your Privilege

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2:05Welcome 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.

2:45What matters is what you can do in the moment. Epictetus didn't care what you read. He didn't care if you'd made it through the densest writings of Chrysippus. Arcus Aurelius didn't care what your job was, what your education was, what your authority was. What mattered was who you were in your actual life. On a recent episode of the Daily Stoic podcast, the great Sam Harris explained something similar. He said it didn't matter what peak experiences you'd had, what insights you'd been able to come up with in meditation, how enlightened you felt after all the years of practice and study. What really counted, he said, was what you could muster in the course of ordinary day-to-day life, or more specifically, in any one present moment.

3:31He was saying that mindfulness isn't this abstract thing. It isn't some recreational activity either. Mindfulness is what you're able to draw on when you get distracted or when you're tempted or when you're cut off in traffic, when you get a bit of terrible news, when your back pain flares up. Harris wasn't claiming to be perfect at this himself, nor is he expecting anyone else to. He was just making the point that true Stoicism, true Zen, true Enlightenment, whatever you want to call it, is something that exists only in the present moment. It's something that exists right now that you are either drawing on or you're not.

4:03You can talk about your philosophy all you want, as Epictetus said. What matters is the degree to which you are able to embody it, big and small, in ordinary and extraordinary situations alike. This is a high bar. It is also a bar that you're constantly getting a new shot at every moment you're alive. So aim high. And if you miss, dust yourself off and try again.

4:40Check your privilege. This is the July 28th entry in the Daily Stoic. And today's quote comes to us from Musonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus. Some people are sharp and others are dull. Some are raised in a better environment, others in worse. The latter having inferior brains, having inferior habits and nurture will require more by the way of proof and careful instruction to master these teachings and to be formed by them. in the same way that bodies in a bad state must be given a great deal of care when perfect health is sought. At the end of a frustrating exchange, you might find yourself thinking, oh, this person is such an idiot, or asking, why can't they just do things right?

5:22But not everyone has had the advantages that you've had. That's not to say that your life has been easy. You've just had a head start over some people. And that's why it is our duty to understand and be patient with others. Philosophy is a spiritual formation, care of the soul. Some need more care than others, just as some have a better metabolism or were born taller than others. The more forgiving and tolerant you can be of others, the more you can be aware of your various privileges and advantages, the more helpful and patient you will be. And again, I think it's worth pointing out here that Epictetus was taught by Musonius Rufus.

6:01So, Musonius Rufus is this teacher. He's known as the Roman Socrates. He's great and wise and brilliant. And he teaches the best and the brightest of Rome, most of which would be rich, powerful, privileged people. And yet somehow he makes room in his classroom for Epictetus. And you think about where Epictetus came from. He walks with a limp because of the years in slavery, because the torture he underwent. You think about the deprivation, the struggle. But Musonius Rufus finds not just a way to reach Epictetus, but make him great. He's patient with him. He encourages him. And this isn't the only evidence we have of Musonius Rufus sort of understanding his own privilege and being generous and open-minded.

6:44Musonius Rufus also famously says that women should be taught philosophy, which was a remarkably progressive thing at that time. So I know like when people hear checker privilege, this was a less loaded term I used as the title of this section when I wrote the book in 2015 and it came out in 2016. I get people have an instinctive reaction as, oh, it's woke or whatever. But the truth is we are all privileged in some form or another. And how do I know this? Because you are listening to this on a podcast, which means you have a smartphone. maybe you're driving in a car it means you're commuting to a job in a city that has public transportation and there are literally billions of people for whom that is not just not true but almost incomprehensibly luxurious and wonderful to them they could not even conceive of doing some of the things that you take for granted and and then even in the context of like let's say you had a super hard life and i i tried to make that caveat in the thing.

7:45Maybe you're tall. Maybe you're beautiful. Maybe your parents actually loved you as a child, right? Maybe you haven't been horribly abused, or maybe you were horribly abused, but not as horribly as other people have, right? We all have privileges in our life. We all have advantages, right? We all have things that give us a leg up in the world. And that's not to say that the other things haven't happened. It's one, to be grateful for those things and to be patient with people that don't have those things, right? And to try to sprinkle the advantages we have, to share it, to spread the wealth, to lift others up, and to be patient and forgiving and understanding with the people who have not been blessed the way that we have.

8:35To be like Musonius Rufus, to be able to say, Musonius Rufus was powerful and important and had access to the best and the brightest, and his greatest legacy was this former slave that he helped. And through helping that former slave, he helped not just that person, not just improve their life, but had an immediate impact then through Marcus Aurelius and through you and I today. We would not be listening to this were it not for the generosity and patience and understanding of Mussoni's roof is too epictetus, and I think that's a wonderful thing to emulate and to pay forward.

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