Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast where we provide one lesson every day to help you with your

most important job being a dad. These are lessons inspired by ancient philosophy, by practical

wisdom, and insights from dads all over the world.

Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

A dad must think the unthinkable.

It's fitting that one of the most important things you could do as a parent would require you to think about a thing that's very nearly impossible for a parent to even consider. It comes to us from Marcus Aurelius by way of Epictetus. As you kiss your son, good night, says Epictetus, whisper to yourself, he may be dead in the morning.

Don't tempt fate, you say, by talking about a natural event, is fate tempted when we speak of grain being

reaped? Of course, this is not an easy thing to do. It goes against all of our impulses, but we must do it. Because life is fleeting and the

world is cruel. Marcus Aurelius lost five children, five. Seneca, we gather, lost one early too. It should

never happen, but it does. It heartbreakingly, world-wreckingly, nobody deserves it does. And it's not that we hope that

Marcus Aurelius or Seneca's philosophical training prepared them for the pain of losing a child.

Nothing can prepare you for that. What we hope is that this exercise meant that they didn't waste

a single second of the time they did get with their beautiful children. A parent who faces

the fact that they can lose a child at any moment is a parent who is present, who loves, who does not

hold on to stupid things or enforce stupid rules. A great dad looks at a cruel world and says,

I know what you can do to my family in the future, but for the moment you've spared me,

I will not take that for granted.

Anxiety, keeping up with the Joneses, caring about getting into that exclusive preschool or into Harvard,

who cares?

Can all go away in a second.

There's nothing we can do about that.

We can, however, drink in the present. We can be

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