You’re Only Loaning This | Life Isn't A Dance

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1:04Welcome 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 in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. And 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.

1:45As we work and achieve, we pile up titles and money. We accumulate assets and influence. We build a life, as they say. And a life is made up of things. Our job, our house, our car, our relationships, our reputation. Looking around at what we possess, what we've poured so much sweat and blood into, is an immensely rewarding experience. As Margaret Atwood writes in a beautiful poem, The moment when, after many years of hard work and a long voyage, you stand in the center of your room, your house, a half-acre, square-mile, island, country, knowing at last how you got there, and say, I own this. But the Stoic knows that we never really own anything.

2:28All we possess in this life, Marcus Aurelius says, even life itself, is really only ours in trust. We are renters. Our lives are here on loan. Loans that can get called in at any time can be fired. Someone can dislodge our seemingly dominant market position. A loved one can leave. People die. And that's why Margaret Atwood warns against the pride and satisfaction of surveying one's possessions. The moment you do that, she says, nature rebels. Almost out of spite, it feels the need to rebuke you for your pride. No, they whisper, you own nothing. You were a visitor, time after time, climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming, we never belonged to you.

3:14You never found us. It was always the other way around. None of us own anything. Everything is constantly in flux. What we have today may be gone tomorrow. We ourselves may be gone tomorrow. Understand that. Appreciate everything accordingly. Be grateful and humble or life will rebuke you. Fate will remind you who is in charge. And nature will reclaim what is hers.

3:48Life is not a dance. This is the September 20th entry in the Daily Stoic. I'm holding it in my hands here. 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living. And by the way, in November, I will be in London, Dublin, and Rotterdam, as well as Vancouver and Toronto. So if you want to Come see me do talks and ask some questions. It should be fun. The talks in Australia were awesome. You can grab those tickets at ryanholiday.net slash tour, and I'll tell you why I'm bringing this up here in a second. But the quote from Marcus, Meditation 761, he says, the art of living is more like wrestling than dancing because an artful life requires being prepared to meet and withstand sudden and unexpected attacks.

4:43Dancing is a popular metaphor for life. One must be limber and agile and go along with the music. One must feel and follow the flow along with their partner. But anyone who has tried to do something difficult where there is competition or an adversary knows that the dancing metaphor is insufficient. Nobody ever gets up on stage and tries to tackle a dancer. The dancer never gets choked out by a rival. For a wrestler, on the other hand, adversity and the unexpected are part and parcel of what they do. Their sport is a battle, just like life. They are fighting an opponent as well as their own limitations, emotions, and training.

5:21Life, like wrestling, requires more than graceful movement. We have to undergo hard training and cultivate an indomitable will to prevail. Philosophy is the steel against which we will sharpen that will and strengthen that resolve. Before I get up on stage, I mean, obviously I want to be loose. I want to be ready. I want to be in a flow state. But I also am prepared for things to go wrong. Actually, when Robert Greene and I gave a talk in Los Angeles back last September, a woman got up to get something from concessions or whatever, and she tripped and fell and had a serious brain injury. You never know what's going to happen, right?

6:05That's like an extreme end of the spectrum. But the other extreme end of the spectrum is stuff goes wrong for me, right? The slides don't work. I forget what I have to say. I don't feel good. Actually, the talk Robert and I were supposed to do in San Francisco a couple months before that, he got seriously, seriously ill and I had to figure out someone to replace him. Guy Raz, a friend and fellow student of the Stoics, stepped in. It was awesome, but very much not what I expected. And so, yeah, you got to flow with it. You got to dance with it. You also got to be prepared for serious things to go wrong.

6:36You got to be prepared for the sudden attacks. You got to be prepared for critics. You got to be prepared for hecklers. You got to be prepared for someone running the event to be a real jerk, right? You got to be prepared for all of it. And you got to have that sort of competitive drive, that urge to not be deterred, to want to win, to want to pull off this difficult thing that you're trying to pull off. And these are just, I don't know, some of the things I think about to kind of hype myself up before I go. You know, I don't listen to beautiful classical music before I go on stage. I listen to heavy metal.

7:12I try to get into a sort of a vibe or a zone. It's funny sometimes, you know, before the talk, the organizers want to chat and I'm like, no, like I'm about to do something hard and I want to get in the right headspace for this. It's a performance, but it's also a contest. It's a competition. It's a wrestling match.

7:34You're It's like, hey, obviously you guys are fans. I'm glad you're listening. But most of the time when I'm talking, I'm not going to be talking to the audiences that I'm talking to in Rotterdam or London or Dublin or whatever. It's not my fans that I'm normally talking to. It's usually people at a company or people at a conference. And I have to win that audience over. I have to fight for their attention. And that's hard. It's harder to do when you're talking about an obscure school of ancient philosophy. So I've always loved this idea. Yeah. Marcus is fond of many metaphors. And he talks about, you know, when you lose the rhythm, come back to it.

8:09So he also liked the idea of dance. And in his famous passage about waking up in the morning, you know, he talks about a dancer's art. So it's not like he was dismissive of these like, you know, fancy, non-masculine dancers. He didn't think that at all. He knew what dance was and he knew that it was difficult. He was just saying like, look, life is a battle. Life is a contest. And this is why we have some of these martial metaphors in Marcus. We have, you know, wrestling metaphors. We have fighting metaphors. We have boxing metaphors. We have, you know, dueling metaphors. We have all this stuff because that's how the Stoics saw life, as a bit of a battle.

8:45And I think that's true. Anyways, I'm excited to see all of you. You can come out and see me. The tour dates are at ryanholiday.net slash tour. If you came and saw me in Australia or saw Robert and I in Seattle and LA, it was awesome to see. You can see the videos of those on the Daily Stoic YouTube, so I'll link to that. in the meantime I'm going to go prep for this thing I'm going to be dug in and ready for attacks I hope nobody jumps up on stage and you know pulls a Chris Rock but if they do I'll be as ready as I can be be well everyone thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast if you don't know this you can get these delivered to you via email every day check it out at dailystoic.com slash email

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