Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today.

Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation,

but also reading a passage from the book, The Daily Stoke,

365 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator Steve Enhancelman.

And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the stoics from Epititus Markis Relius, Seneca,

and some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

I want to talk to you.

Can you forgive them? They hurt you, your parents. Everyone's dead. Some in big ways, some in small ways,

it's just a fact. As the poet Philip Larkin wrote, they fuck you up your mom and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra gest for you.

Clearly, Markis Relius was not a perfect father. Seneca's father must have been a tough man to grow up with.

A towering figure was so much ambition, such strong opinions on what his son should do.

And back to Markis Relius, there was a man who lost his own father early and then ended up with Hadrian and Antoninus as his stepfathers,

whom he admired, but also struggled with. You think that he didn't have complicated issues about that? Possibly some anger.

This pain is real. It's not fair, but we have to figure out how to process it, how to move past it.

Stoicism is not as we have discussed, simply the stuffing down of one's emotions. It's not pretending that feelings don't exist.

The comedian Pete Holmes, who we talked to on the Daily Stove podcast recently, has gone to great lengths to process the similar and timeless feelings he has about his own parents.

As he explained to me every time he thinks about his parents or talks to them, he says to himself, I forgive you, I forgive you.

It's an active process, something he is constantly working on, willing himself towards, because it won't happen on its own,

because it's vitally important if he wants to be a good father himself, and not be made miserable in the present by old wounds from the past.

Forgiveness is a critical part of that virtue of justice to the Stoics, but it's hard. It doesn't just happen.

It's something we have to work on. We have to will ourselves to do, as Pete said, and we have to start today.

...