A (5:44)

Don'T hide from your feelings. This is today's entry in the Daily Stoic and our quote today is from Seneca in his essay to Helvia, his mother. It's better to conquer grief, he says, than to deceive it. We've all lost people we're close to, a friend, a colleague, a parent, a grandparent. And while we were suffering from our grief, some well meaning person did their best to take our mind off of it or make us think about something else for a couple hours. However kind, these gestures are misguided. The Stoics are stereotyped as suppressing their emotions, but their philosophy was actually intended to teach us to face, to process and deal with emotions immediately instead of running from them. Tempting as it is to deceive yourself or hide from a powerful emotion like grief by telling yourself and other people that you're fine, awareness and understanding are better. Distraction might be pleasant in the short term, going to the gladiatorial games as a Roman might have done, but focusing is better in the long term. That means facing it now. Process and parse what you are feeling. Remove your expectations, your entitlements, your sense of having been wrong. Find the positive in the situation, but also sit with your pain and accept it, remembering that it is a part of life and that is how we conquer grief. I had Kate Bowler on the podcast. She has this book called Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Been Told. And the point she finds out she has cancer and all these people come and go, oh, it happened for a reason. Everything happens for a reason. And her response was I'd love to know the reason she was rejecting these sort of platitudes that we give people when they are grieving to try to take their mind off it. We distract them, we want to make them laugh. We say, oh, I've been through that too.

A (7:37)

There's no way out but through feeling, thinking, dealing with you Know the Stoics knew grief. As Seneca was writing that essay to his mother, he was grieving himself. He'd lost a child. As I've been going back through Meditations, we have this leather bound edition and I rereading it like a fresh copy, and for whatever reason, I was just skipping through and I found all the different instances where Marcus was talking about, like, loss in children, which is extra haunting when you think about how many he lost. Five, six, we don't know exactly. But almost more of his children did not survive to adulthood than did he buried five, six children. Just the magnitude of that grief.

A (8:23)

And if we take Meditations, then as a much more personal book, a book of a man working through his grief, trying to conquer it, not deceive it, it's both very humanizing and haunting at the same time. Marcus isn't different than you and I. He's not this magical robot, but he was someone who put in the work to deal with, to think through, to talk about his emotions. I just, I hate this stereotype of the Stoics as being unfeeling. They were feeling, they just tried not to be overwhelmed, overcome, paralyzed by those feelings. And part of the way they did it was by working on them. So, you know, this month in the Daily Stoic is about death and grief and mortality. And I think it's important for those of you who are grieving, for those of us who are grieving, who have lost someone or may lose someone, you know, it's okay to cry about that. There's a story about Marcus crying about the loss of one of his tutors. That's a human thing. If you're still crying about it, paralyzed by it a year later, you should probably get some help. You're probably torturing yourself. You're probably doing something that they, the person you are mourning would not dream of wanting or cursing you with. So you got to deal with it. You got to face it. You gotta process it. That's the only way out. There is no way out but through. That's today's message from the Daily Stoic. And I hope you guys are getting ready for the holidays. I hope you're thinking about your New Year's resolutions. Happy holidays. We'll talk soon.

A (10:03)

Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

A (10:35)

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B (10:41)

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