What Marcus Learned From His Mother | 6 Stoic Lessons In Stillness

Last year, the writer Chuck Palahniuk received the kind of news that all of us dread. Someone he trusted—the book agent who had represented him for years—had been slowly but steadily robbing him blind. All the millions he’d earned from the royalties of his bestselling books were gone. All the financial security he thought he’d built up was an illusion—undone by the cruel deception and greed of someone close to him. In July, Palahniuk was asked what it felt like to lose all his money. He stared down at the ground. He was quiet. Then he answered: “It’s kind of nice. Writing was initially my way of saving money, because if you’re writing, you’re not spending. So it throws me back into writing. There are larger issues in life – the embezzlement is dwarfed by my father-in-law’s death. And there’s the awareness that I’m the person who got me to this place, and I’m still that person, so I can still turn it all back around, and come up with something really strong and vibrant and interesting.”First off, kudos is due to Palaniuk, because that’s a far more enlightened view than most of us would take of such a betrayal. It could not have been natural or easy to get to that point. The other stages of grief would come before such acceptance: anger, denial, bargaining. But it’s impressive that he got there.It’s also very Stoic. Seneca spoke often of the reversals that life has in store for us—no matter how successful or secure we might believe that we are. “No man has ever been so far advanced by Fortune,” he wrote, “that she did not threaten him as greatly as she had previously indulged him.” Which is why we have to make sure that our identity and our happiness is not tied up in physical or financial things—because these things are not in our control. Seneca’s advice was that we ought to “possess nothing that can be snatched from us to the great profit of a plotting foe.”Chuck Palahniuk’s money was stolen. That kind of theft is always a possibility since money is never really “ours” to begin with. It’s just a number in our bank account. It’s something on loan to us until we spend it or until it’s rendered worthless by some government institution we don’t control. But our confidence—that sense that we’re the person who earned it in the first place, the person who has worked hard and sacrificed and created—that’s 100% ours. No one can take that from us. Fortune can take our jobs, unfairly tarnish our good name, or burn down our house. Can it change who we are? Our sense of ourselves? Only if we let it. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

12 Maalis 20193min

In his wonderful book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, the Pulitzer Prize winning scholar Stephen Greenblatt spends a lot of time analyzing a pivotal moment early in the life of Saint Augustine, when he was at a Roman bath with his father. One of the observations Greenblatt makes is about the steamy, quiet, relaxing atmosphere of the baths, with its alternating hot and cold, the scrubbing and soaking and resting and massaging. The kind of baths that Saint Augustine visited in the 4th century, Greenblatt writes, “was everywhere the same and has continued virtually unchanged to the present.” The bath he visited when he was simply Augustine of Hippo was essentially identical to the baths Marcus Aurelius experienced, that Seneca wrote about, that Cato was famously shoved at (and forgave his accidental assailant), that you might visit on a vacation to Istanbul, or really, not all that different from the locker room at one of those private athletic clubs in most major cities. You can actually still visit some of Rome’s ancient thermal baths. Isn’t that interesting? For all the things that have changed and for all the technological advancements that happened between Cato’s time and St. Augustine’s time (about 400 years) and between St. Augustine’s time and ours (almost 1600 years), this experience fundamentally hasn’t really changed. We’re still just human beings who occasionally need to get scrubbed down or sweat out the dirt and stress of life. Over and over again, Marcus reminded himself about how similar his life was to the past and how little the future would deviate from the same patterns and cycles. That most of the “change” we see happening around us is window dressing or a distraction. He made this point to remind himself to focus on the timelessness of human nature and to humble himself in comparison to the distant past and the endless future. We can do the same, today, by stopping and thinking about that old 19th century French epigram about how the more things change, the more they stay the same. We can take care to notice how different words we still use today evolve from ancient usage, or how eerily similar certain practices or experiences remain after all this time. We can pick up a classic book and think about how generations before us held that same text in their hands and what they thought about it. It will humble us. It will give us perspective.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

11 Maalis 20193min

One of Seneca’s most powerful strategies comes from his time as a Senator. Speaking again of a thought from Epicurus, with which he only partly agrees, Seneca explains that he is so readily able to draw from the teachings of a rival school for his writing because of a trick he learned in the Roman senate. Whenever a fellow senator introduced a motion with which he was not in full agreement, he would ask the Senator to break the motion up into two parts, thus allowing other Senators to vote for the part they approved of and ignore or vote against the other part. It was this strategy that Seneca applied to Epicurus and, indeed, that all good politicians use to do their job—it’s called finding common ground. It’s focusing on where there is agreement rather than on where there is conflict. We could all use a little bit more of this in our lives. Philosophically, it’s fascinating how much Christianity and Buddhism and Hinduism and Stoicism all have in common. We could spend a whole lifetime studying and learning from where these schools overlap...but that’s harder to do than holing up inside the school we were raised in and then locking the gates and slapping a label on anyone left on the outside. They are the other. We do this instinctively with our politics. Democrat or Republican. Liberal or Conservative. Globalist or Nationalist. We continually define ourselves in opposition to the other. And yet, with the exception of a small minority at the fringes of both ends of the spectrum, pretty much everyone agrees on the very big ideas about what makes a good life or what a good country looks like. Every parent wants the best for their child, just as every nation wants the best for its people. These are basic truths so deeply ingrained that we’ve begun to take them for granted and instead we have chosen to focus our attention only on what makes us different.Life would be better if we could rely on Seneca’s wisdom more often. We need to look for common ground and use it. We need to see the good in other people and in other ideas and ignore the rest, whenever possible. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has a great line about how in marriage, it helps to be a little deaf. So too in the world of ideas and in living next to your fellow humans, does it pay to be able to turn a deaf ear or a blind eye every once in awhile. Most things are not in perpetual conflict with each other. And even when they are, there is still plenty of common ground. Let’s commit to focusing a bit more on that, on breaking things up into their constituent parts—like Seneca with so many pieces of a complicated motion—and accepting those parts wherever we can. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

8 Maalis 20194min

There is a beautiful passage on the last page of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s, The Little House in the Big Woods. She writes of an evening in the cabin with her family, her father playing the fiddle, her mom knitting in a rocking chair. “She thought to herself, ‘This is now.’ She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”It’s a passage that has resonated with millions of people over the last 86 years, including the writer Gretchen Rubin who ends her book Happier At Home with a meditation on how it has inspired her for most of her life. But what does it mean? It means the same thing that the Stoics have always talked about. That you have to live in the very now, even when it is ordinary and quiet, because the now is very special. It is the only thing that is true. What has passed is past, and our memories of it gradually degrade and betray us. What has yet to pass is future, and as we should know by now is never guaranteed. Now is all that is real."Give yourself a gift," Marcus Aurelius wrote, "the present moment."Yet too many of us reject that gift. We continue to think of long ago. We dream of or fear a distant future. We are distracted or preoccupied and miss what is happening around us. It’s the quiet evenings at home with family that we should be present for. It’s the ordinary present that we should cherish. Because it’s all we have.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

7 Maalis 20192min

Although today we consider “passion” to be a good thing—as in find your passion—to the Stoics, the passions were something to be wary of. Desire, rivalry, excitement, infatuation, anger. These were powerful forces that, if left unchecked, were likely to hurt the person who had turned themselves over to them (and likely to hurt innocent bystanders too). The warning against manufacturing or feeding these emotional drives is a good one and ought to be heeded. But what is a person to do when they find themselves unexpectedly angry or hurt or excited? Should they just stuff this emotion down? Should they pretend it doesn’t exist? The Stoics talk a lot less about this. One suspects they might agree with the solution proposed by the beloved children’s television host, Mr. Rogers:“But do you know what I do when I’m angry? I like to swim, and so I swim extra hard when I’m angry...There are many things that you can do when you’re angry that don’t hurt you or anybody else.” What he’s talking about is the need for an outlet for dangerous passions—so we can get them out of our system as soon as possible, with as little harm as possible. One suspects that’s why Marcus Aurelius was such an avid journaler—he was pouring those passions out onto the page. His temper, his fears, his frustrations. All of it came out in a practice he knew well. But one can just as easily do this on the basketball court or the swimming pool. Or into a microphone or on the keys of a piano.A politician fueled by anger is going to get themselves in trouble. A politician who lifts weights when they are angry is going to make better policy decisions. A hurt spouse who gets up and takes a walk and then comes back to the argument later is going to be more rational, kinder, and less likely to say something they regret. Passions are inevitable and unavoidable. Life creates them. Life incites them. Still, we can’t give ourselves over to them, simply because they are natural, or we will hurt ourselves and other people in the process. Nor can we try to stuff them down and white knuckle it. Like a long-quiet faultline or a sleeping volcano, on the surface there may be serenity, where beautiful things can grow and life can be lived, but under the surface the tension and the pressure has been building all along, and eventually, inevitably, it is going to find a way to vent. Stuffing down your emotions and passions only makes it more likely that they’ll explode in spectacular, life-altering, earth-scorching fashion.We have to find helpful, harmless outlets for our emotions if we want to be able to manage them and avoid seismic, cataclysmic disruptions to our lives. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

6 Maalis 20194min

In 2017, Good Morning Britain anchor Susanna Reid presented her co-anchor (actually she calls him her TV husband), Piers Morgan, a gift. It was a copy of the book Ego is the Enemy. She thought he could use the book because Piers was “irritating, annoying, divisive, over-opinionated,” and “ready to start a fight in an empty room.” She meant it both as a compliment and as good natured (and true) feedback because anyone who has ever watched Piers Morgan on TV knows he has a big ego. Piers replied that he had no disagreement with her assessment but that he did resent the idea that ego was anything but a virtue. “Ego is your friend,” he said. “If you don’t believe in yourself folks, nobody else will.”Is he right? Is Ego a virtue? It almost feels petty, by way of an answer, to point out all the times Piers’s ego has gotten him in trouble. One notable time is, when interviewing an activist protesting Donald Trump’s forced separation of immigrants, he repeatedly tried to speak over her, and asked why she would protest against this when Obama had also deported immigrants. Instead of allowing her to explain he, egotistically, assumed he had her all figured out (indeed he called Obama her “hero”). It set the activist up for the perfect comeback: “I’m a communist, you idiot.” Believing you’re right is not the same as having your facts straight. As many of us embarrassingly learn. The mistake Piers (and a lot of people make) is that they conflate confidence and ego. Confidence is something you earn, by putting in the work, doing the research, by taking risks, and being effective when it counts. Remember Seneca’s line about how a person who has never gone through adversity is to be pitied, because they have no idea what they are capable of?  What he was basically saying is that on the other side of difficulty is a gift—confidence. Simply believing that you’re capable of things you’ve never actually done or experienced, simply believing that you’re special and important without any evidence? Folks, that’s not your friend. That’s delusion!So let’s put this misconception to bed. Ego is the enemy. Confidence is the key. Evidence is better than belief, facts better than dreams. When you figure that out, you’ll be better at whatever you do in life, and probably piss fewer people off! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

5 Maalis 20193min

Maybe you’ve had a hard time of it recently. That business project is three months over projections. Your book isn’t really selling. The comments in your performance review were brutal. Life can be like that. It kicks us around. The stuff we expected to be simple turns out to be tough. The people we thought were friends let us down. A couple storms or unexpected weather patterns just add a whole bunch of difficulty on top of whatever we’ve been doing. How could that possibly be seen as a good thing? You have to squint a bit to see it, but there is one way: if you see what’s been happening as practice, as training. Seneca wrote that only the prize fighter who has been bloodied and bruised—in training and in previous matches—can go into the ring confident of his chances of winning. The one who has never been touched before, never had a hard fight? That’s a fighter who is scared. And if they aren’t, they should be. Because they have no actual idea how they’re going to hold up. His point was that the boxer who has “seen his own blood, who has felt his teeth rattle beneath his opponent’s fist...who has been downed in body but not in spirit…”—they know what they can take. They know what the darkness before the proverbial dawn feels like. Only they have a true and accurate sense of rhythms of a fight and what winning is going to require them to do. That sense comes from getting knocked around. That sense is only possible because of the hard times—the hard knocks—they’ve experienced before. So yeah, things might not be great right now. Obviously it’d be nice if they were better. But if they were, you’d also be weaker for it. Less informed. Less in touch with yourself and the fight you’re in. So squint and see that. Because it’s an important perspective.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

4 Maalis 20193min

Spring is here! While most of us unthinkingly set our clocks forward (or have devices that do it for us), how many of us take any steps to spring our lives forward? March is when we start to think of spring cleaning, but how many of us get our whole houses in order? Not just our physical spaces, but our minds, our routines, our assumptions?Think of how you spent the last week. Were those seven days as efficient or productive as they could be? Or did you waste time? Were things more complicated than necessary? Did you fall back on bad habits? Were you, like so many people, still stuck in the doldrums of winter?The 10-Day Spring Forward Challenge is set up to push you to examine those parts of your life, to examine your choices, to examine your relationships and move you closer to living your best life.It was Marcus Aurelius who said “This is what you deserve. You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow.”It’s up to you whether you’re going to let those . New Year’s resolutions dissolve into missed opportunities , whether you’re going to keep doing things the way you’ve always done them. OR, you could give yourself 10 days of improvement and a runway for true, sustainable change. Challenge yourself to spring forward to be the person you know you can be.[Buy Now]The 10-Day Spring Forward Challenge is a set of ten all-new actionable challenges — presented at a pace of one per day — built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. Ten challenges designed to help you bring a sense of clarity and purpose to your life.Each day you will be presented with a challenge that will help you:Simplify your lifeGain control over your timeFace your fearsExpand your point of viewsAbandon harmful habitsDo more with your daysThese won’t be pie-in-the-sky, theoretical discussions but clear, immediate exercises and methods you can start right now. We’ll tell you exactly what to do, how to do it, and why it works — and we’ll give you strategies for maintaining this way of living for not just the next year, but for your whole life.What is gaining back a few hours per day worth? What would you give for the key to unshackle you from the habits holding you back? How great would it feel to belong to a dedicated community — part of a tribe — of people just like you, struggling, growing, and making that satisfying progress towards the kind of person they know they can be? Toward the person who knows, lives, loves and appreciates the good life.[Buy Now]Sign up for the 10-Day Spring Forward Challenge now and see what you’re capable of doing and who you are capable of becoming.Here is what you’ll get if you sign up:10 custom challenges delivered daily (nearly 15,000 words of all new original content)10 custom video messages from bestselling author Ryan Holiday.A printable 10-day calendar with custom illustrations to track your progressGroup Slack channel to communicate and motivate other participantsWrap-up live Q&A with Ryan HolidayIn addition, for all of you who are deep divers and intellectual thread-pullers, each day’s challenge will include a compendium of further reading that will equip you with the foundational wisdom upon See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

1 Maalis 20194min