Without It You’d Be Lost | Push For Deep Understandings

0:28Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

0:44Meditations, you could say, is Marcus Aurelius exploring himself. That's literally what the title of the book means. The book isn't for you and I. It's things to oneself, to himself. self. Marcus is exploring his fears, his desires, his flaws, his virtues. And that's the journey that philosophy took Marcus on. Since he was a young man until right before his death, he was exploring himself, trying to understand himself and his nature better. But how about you? How well do you know the back roads of the self, as Marcus calls them in book four? You know every inch of the ride to work, you know this road or that city, you say like the back of your hand.

1:27But how well do you know yourself? Too many of us are total strangers to ourselves. We seek busyness, we seek external markers, we seek out others to understand us and demand that they hear what we're saying. Meanwhile, we ignore the voice inside us, the one that is whispering to us so many important lessons, the one that is shouting so many warnings. Well, meditation and journaling and long conversations like the one between Seneca and Lucilius or us via Seneca and his writings, this is how we get to know ourselves. This is the journey we have to go on because no one can go on it for us. Because it won't matter where we go in life, we'll be lost if we don't find ourselves first.

2:12So in 2017, we did the Daily Stoic Journal, which is the idea of one question every day to meditate on that's built around the ideas in the Daily Stoic. And I liked the idea of having some continuity, a slip cover that goes on there. It says, make time on the front, which is often how I sign the journal. The idea is you got to make time for philosophy. You got to make time to get to know yourself. There's a cool quote from Seneca on the inside, one from Epictetus on the back. and there's a spot to hold your pen. And it's designed to fit the US edition. It'll fit the UK edition as well. Not quite as snug, but it fits for both.

2:50And if you haven't picked up the journal, you can get them as a package. I'll link to it in today's show notes, or you can just grab the cover to throw it on your edition of the Daily Stoic Journal. Use it to get to know the back roads yourself. Keep journaling, everyone.

3:08I'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.

3:45Everything they sell has high standards to help you shop with confidence. Enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today we are pushing for a deeper understanding. This is the January 24th entry in The Daily Stoic. I am back sitting in my office, so I am holding cloth-bound edition of The Daily Stoic, 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living. If you want a signed copy, you can go to store.dailystoic.com. The quote is Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 17. From Rusticus, he writes, I learned to read carefully and not be satisfied with a rough understanding of the whole, and not to agree too quickly with those who have a lot to say about something.

4:39The first book of Mark Sturrilis' Meditations begins with a catalog of gratitude. He thanks, one by one, the leading influences in his life. One of the people he thanks is Rusticus, his philosophy teacher, who developed in his student a love of deep clarity and understanding, a desire to not just stop at the surface when it comes to learning things. It is also from Rusticus that Marcus Aurelius was introduced to Epictetus. In fact, Rusticus loaned Marcus his personal copy of Epictetus's lecture. Marcus clearly wasn't satisfied with just getting the gist of some of these lectures and didn't simply accept them on his teacher's recommendation.

5:16Paul Johnson once joked that Edmund Wilson read books as though the author was on trial for his life. That's how Marcus read Epictetus, and when the lessons passed muster, he absorbed them. They became part of his DNA as a human being. He quoted them at length over the course of his life, finding real clarity and strength in the words, even amid the immense luxury and power he would come to possess. This is the kind of deep reading and study that we need to cultivate as well, which is why we're reading or listening in this case to one page a day in the Daily Stoic instead of a chapter at a time.

5:50so we can take the time to read attentively and deeply. And you know, it's funny, I was working on something this morning for the Daily Stoke and I grabbed my copy of Meditations, which was sitting under this microphone I'm recording to you now. And this is not my oldest copy, my oldest copy. No, no, this is my main one. This is the one I bought in 2006, almost 20 years of miles on this thing. And you can just see the different eras. There's green highlighter and yellow highlighter. And I don't really use highlighter anymore. and there's different pens and there's Sharpie, you're marking things and you don't even know you're going to need them, right?

6:27So this is the fourth entry. He says, my great-grandfather, to avoid the public schools, to hire good private teachers, and to accept the resulting costs as money well spent. Now, obviously in the ancient world, private versus public schools are very different. And depending on where you live, the debate's very different. But it's just interesting to me that I marked down this thing before I even conceived of having kids. And here I am thinking about where our youngest is going to go to school. And I pick up this book and I, oh yeah, there's something about this, right? Like there's something about my copy of Meditations that's almost, it's kind of its own commonplace book.

7:05I mean, the first entry of Meditations, My Grandfather Varys, Character and Self-Control. That's two of the books in the Virtue series. Let's see what I have from Rusticus. I've marked here the first line, the recognition that I need to train and discipline my character. Temperance. I wrote a little note there. Not to write treaties on abstract questions or deliver moralizing little sermons or compose imaginary descriptions on the simple life of the man who lives only for others. Not to dress up to stroll around the house or things like that, to write straightforward letters and to behave in a conciliatory way when people who have angered or annoyed us want to make up.

7:40You know what's interesting? as we talk about this in the lives of the stoics marcus and rusticus sometimes quarreled but we're told that they made up very quick so he's applying that in practice but to read attentively and not be satisfied with getting the gist of it and to not fall for every smooth talker and uh i've got it circled in pencil i've got it in orange highlighter and yellow highlighter and then the line which i i mentioned earlier and for introducing me to epictetus's lectures and loaning me his own copy. So this book and all these different passes over and over again, I'm taking something a little bit new and a little bit different.

8:21And if I just read the book once, maybe that's the only time you've gone through it, or you read Seneca's letters, or you read some of Epictetus or whatever. The point is, it's about the going over, over and over and over again. That's what we're trying to get out of it. And if you're just, oh, I get the gist of it. Oh, I heard it on a daily Stoic podcast. Oh, I saw this on Instagram. Or, oh, I watched a little video about it. No, you don't actually understand it. It's only through this process of going over it over and over and over again that you really can even come to begin to understand what the Stoics are talking about.

8:55I know that there are things I'm taking out of the Stoics for the first time now, 20 years into it. And if I could urge you anything on your journey through Stoicism, it would be to dive into it that deeply and to not just read the same things more than once, but to read around them, to go down different rabbit holes, to get various bits of context that then when you come back to it, you're able to understand something you've read in a new way. That, to me, is the process of reading and understanding the Stoics. And that's what Marcus was particularly grateful for, Rusticus, for showing him. And I'm grateful to both of them for showing that to me.

9:39And I'm trying to pass that along to you now.

10:12look ads are annoying they are to be avoided if at all possible i understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like The Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, Well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free.

11:00No interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for. And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. and we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.