This Isn’t How Anyone Wants It To Go (So This Is What We Have To Do) | Practice Love

Ryan Holiday (0:00)

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

This isn't how anyone wants it to go, so this is what we have to do. Do you think this is what Marcus Aurelius planned? Do you think it's what he wanted? That he hoped after two decades of relative peace and prosperity that his reign would be marked by a flood and a famine and a plague and a war?

Did he have to be gone so much that his children would suffer as they did, that his health would be such a constant drag?

Of course not. Nobody would plan for that. Nobody would choose most of the difficulties and troubles they face. The question, as we've said before, is how do you react when those difficulties and troubles happen anyway?

I've been known to throw a tantrum. Phoebe Bridger sings on her new album, When Things Are Not The Way I Imagine Them. That's what many of us do. That's what Marcus Aurelius could have been excused for doing. Could have blamed others, could have cursed the gods, could have distracted himself with pleasure or delusions.

Instead, he got to work. He did his best to rise and meet these challenges. He did not take them personally. He did not try to make them somebody else's problem. He did not waste his time, as he said, delving into what lies beneath, investigating every cause or rabbit hole. Nor did he let his life be crushed by imagination as a whole, catastrophizing, dreading, worrying. Again, he got to work. And that's how we should meet today and tomorrow when they do not go as we imagine.

The Stoic notion of sympathia, that we are all part of an organic whole, connected by mutual interests and affinities, is greater than the golden rule. Don't treat others how you would like to be treated. Treat them like you would treat yourself, because we are all one. Seneca said that whenever he encountered another human being, he saw an opportunity for kindness. And he learned from Hikato of Rhodes, that if you want to be loved, there's only one thing you can do, love others. Who can you give love to this week? What kindness can you expend? How can you show how you feel, the strangers to friends and family? And how can you show them that you actually believe we are all part of the same whole? And this is from this week's entry in The Daily Stoic Journal, 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living, by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon, and then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand, write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them. You can check out The Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold. You can also get a signed personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. In the all is one chapter of stillness is the key. There's a quote I like from Seneca. He says, all that you behold, that which comprises both God and man is one. We are all part of one great body. There's this quote I love from Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut who was up in space looking down at the earth. He says that he felt an instant global consciousness, a people orientation and intense dissatisfaction, the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it. So this idea that we are all one, this sympathia idea to me is the essence of Stoicism. Stoicism isn't to make you an island to disconnect you from other people. Quite the contrary as Seneca says, it's to make you kinder and more connected to other people. Seneca, the three quotes we have today, one is Seneca quoting Hikato. He says, I can teach you a love potion made without any drugs, herbs or special spell. If you would be loved, love. And then in the Happy Life, Seneca says, a benefit should be kept like a buried treasure only to be dug up in necessity. Nature bids us to do well by all. Wherever there's a human being, we have an opportunity for kindness. And then in Moral Letters 95, he says, nature produced us as a family since we all sprang from the same source and towards the same end. Nature bestowed upon us mutual love and joined us together as friends. I think going out into nature, looking at something majestic, or as Edgar Mitchell did, looking at the earth from a distance, it does give you this sense of our interconnectedness. It makes a lot of the things that we get angry about feel very petty and small and insignificant.