You Get To Choose This (So Don’t) | We Reap What We Sow

0:05Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

1:09control so much. What happens? When I interviewed happiness expert Dr. Lori Santos for the Daily Stoic podcast, her class at Yale is one of the most popular in the school's history, she told us that in addition to wearing a Memento Mori ring every day, I wear one too, you've probably seen it if you've ever seen videos of me or I'm doing talks, she also has this bracelet that reminds her of the Buddhist story of the second arrow. What is the second arrow? The first arrow is all the stuff we've talked about. Someone says something rude to you, a car breaks down, a business fails, a deal falls through, a job opportunity slips away.

1:48What follows is the second arrow. When we ruminate on our suffering, when we blame ourselves, when we tell ourselves we'll never recover, when we choose to feel singled out. In meditations, Mark Cerullo would talk about how the harm doesn't come so much from the event, but from feeling harmed by it. That is the second arrow. We choose to say we've been insulted. We choose to think I'll never recover. We choose resentment. We choose self-doubt afterwards. We choose to despair or give up on humanity. And it is here, not in the event itself, that the real harm is done, not just in our perceptions, but in how it changes us and our behavior going forward.

2:30The first arrow is coming. Let's avoid shooting ourselves. The second one.

2:43Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Basko County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation, it getting me to and from my house, it unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

3:28We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven it across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course. Because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory.

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5:44We reap what we sow. This is the October 27th entry in the Daily Stoic. Crimes often return to their teachers. This is from Seneca's play Theestes, which is a dark, disturbing play, to put it mildly, but a fascinating read. It's ironic that Seneca would have one of his characters utter this line, because as we know, for many years, Seneca served as a tutor and mentor to the Emperor Nero. And while there is a lot of evidence that Seneca was in fact a positive moral influence on this deranged young man, even at the time, some of Seneca's contemporaries found it strange that a philosopher would serve as the right-hand man to such an evil person.

6:27They called him the tyrant teacher. And just as Shakespeare taught in Macbeth, bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague the inventor. Seneca's collaboration with Nero ultimately ends with the student murdering the teacher. And it's something to think about when you consider whom you work with and whom to do business with in life. If you show a client how to do something unethical or illegal, might they return the favor to an unsuspecting you later? If you provide a bad example to your employees, to your associates, to your children, might they betray you or hurt you down the road?

7:03What goes around comes around, is the saying. Or karma, the notion we have imported from the East, teaches us a similar idea. Seneca paid the price for his instructions to Nero, and as has been true throughout the ages, his hypocrisy, avoidable or not, was costly, and so too will yours be. There's a great tweet that came out March 12th, 2019 that I think of often. It says, me sowing, haha, fuck, yes. And it says, me reaping. Well, this fucking sucks. What the fuck? And then there is, of course, the other famous tweet that says, well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions. As the expression now goes, right, fuck around and find out.

7:51That's what happened to Seneca, Right. Seneca rolled the dice, thought he could feed the monster, thought he could constrain Nero. He was exactly like a lot of the figures that I talked about in my podcast episode with Tim Miller, the right wing political operative who who saw so many people convince themselves. said these sort of minor savior complexes, that they were very important. They were important enough they could constrain Trump or get something out of him that would be good for them in the short term. It always comes back to bite us, right? The consequences of our actions come back to us.

8:32Crimes return to their teachers. You reap what you sow. And this was the biggest mistake of Seneca's life. It's a mistake I've made in my life. I thought it was different. I thought I could make it work. I thought I was making a bargain that would work out. And it didn't. It never does. We learn from the Stoics not just what they tell us, what they teach us, what they write about, but the mistakes that they made in their life, right? Marcus Aurelius, his example shows us hopefully something about being a better parent. Seneca teaches us, you know, Who to work for, who not to work for, how to detangle ourselves from clearly toxic, unchangeable situations.

9:18Seneca never, unfortunately, speaks about this explicitly or explicitly enough. He just sort of hints at it at his plays. But we can learn plenty from this example, and it's why I put it in the Daily Stoic. And it's just a reminder, crimes return to their teachers.

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