You Have Access to a Miracle of History

0:00Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14It is remarkable and very, very lucky that the book survives. Imagine, it was never written for publication. It could have been destroyed by a family member. It could have been lost to fire or to time, as all the writings of Zeno and Chrysippus were, as nearly half the writings of Seneca were. It could have been banned by the church or tucked away and forgotten in some archive, never to be seen again. So that meditation survives is a miracle of history. We have in the pages of this little book the thoughts of the most powerful man in the world. We have him ruminating on how to deal with difficult people, how to overcome obstacles, how to face the inevitability of death.

1:01And we have him doing this for his own personal edification, not for posterity or for performance. But we could also say that this is all incredibly misleading as a result. And in fact, that many people have been misled by meditations. They think that Marcus Aurelius is depressing. They think Stoicism is dark and joyless, even violent. But what is written in the pages of Meditations is not who Marcus Aurelius was as a person, as a friend, as a husband or a father. We have to remember that in Meditations we see only what he was struggling with, what he needed reminders of, of what he was trying to cling to in a difficult moment.

1:43What was published in Meditations, you could argue what survives in most of the Stoic writings, obliterates the full and complex human life behind those words. Because the Stoics weren't just leaders and philosophers, they were also parents and spouses and friends who experienced joy, who fell in love, who cherished the beauty of the world around them. Marcus Aurelius begins his meditations not with Stoic doctrine, but with gratitude for all the people in his life and what they taught him. The whole concept of writing meditation, said Donald Robertson, one of Marcus's best biographers. When he was on the Daily Stoic podcast, he said that it's about following through on this thing he remembers his mother saying when he was younger.

2:23which is to work on his character to improve his mind and not just his external behavior. And this is one of the many reasons why meditations hasn't just survived, but has endured all these years. And this month we're celebrating what a miracle that is by helping you live it. We're calling April Marcus Aurelius month here, meditations month, because it's Marcus's 1900th and 5th birthday. And so we've just been doing this deep dive into meditations. We have this awesome step-by-step guide, sort of a course about meditations, if you've been interested in reading the book. And then we're going to be doing a live Q &A as part of that course, which is for everyone who has purchased it.

3:08I'll link all of that in today's show notes or just head over to dailystoic.com slash meditations.

3:25AnnamSA