Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues,

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

Be patient with them. When we were kids, life was often overwhelming and bewildering.

We would fall asleep in a car seat or a stroller and wake up hours later in a dark room with no idea how we got there.

Everything was new.

We had to walk into a classroom for the first time, sit at something called the desk, and stay there all day, way from our parents, learning from strangers.

We were constantly being subjected to rules that

no one had explained, told to do things that we didn't understand. But ultimately, adults understand

that it's difficult to be a kid, and that's why we're patient with them, why we take our time

to explain things to them, why we don't hold their mistakes or their tantrums against them. But is

it really all that different to be an adult?

Many of us are still walking into new rooms for the first time. New jobs, new relationships,

old relationships with new problems, children of our own to care for, aging parents who now need

us in ways they never did before, responsibilities we didn't have yesterday, rules and practices and cultural

norms that are constantly changing. In Marcus Reelius' famous passage about the obnoxious

and rude and frustrating people he knows he'll meet in the course of a day, he makes a really

important point. He reminds himself and us why people are like this. They are like this, he says,

because they don't know better,

because no one taught them. All these things result from there not knowing what is good and what is

evil, he writes. And how can I be angry at my kin or even hateful towards them? Everyone is new to

this life thing. We're all figuring it out as we go, still reacting, still afraid, still working through lessons we haven't mastered yet. Like a kid, we've never been this age before.

Nobody has. So let's be patient. Let's assume the best. Let's help them do better.

...