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Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four

Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to worker to get the kids to school.

We have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring.

Hey, I'm Cassie Depeckle, the host of Wanderies Against the Odds. In our next season, Amelia Earhart wants to make history by flying across the Atlantic alone, but brutal weather and malfunctioning equipment could leave her lost at sea. Listen to Against the Odds on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts.

Life comes at you fast. Life comes at you fast. So you better be ready. In 1880, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his brother, my happiness is so great that it makes me almost afraid. In October of that year, life got even better as he wrote in his diary the night of his wedding to Alice, halfway Lee, our intense happiness is too sacred to be written about.

He would consider it to be one of the best years of his life. He got married, wrote a book, attended law school and won his first election for public office. The street continued in 1883. He wrote, I can imagine nothing more happy in life than an evening spent in the cozy little sitting room before a bright fire of soft coal.

My books all around me and playing backgammon with my own dandy wife. And that's how he and Alice spent that cold winter as it crawled into the new year. He wrote in late January that he felt he was fully coming into his own. I feel now as though I have the reins in my hand, he said.

And on February 12th, 1884, his first daughter was born two days later, his wife would be dead of brights disease now known as kidney failure. His mother had died only hours earlier in the same house of typhoid fever. Roosevelt marked that day in his diary with a large X next to it. He wrote, the light has gone out of my life as they say things come at you fast.

Had the last few weeks not been an example of that in December, the Dow is at 28,000 things were good enough that people were complaining about the war on Christmas and debating the skin color of Santa Claus.

In January, the Dow was at 29,000 and people were outraged about the recent Oscar nominations. In February, it reached a staggering 29,568 and Delta Airlines stock fell 25% in week

because people argued over a message from the CEO about passengers reclining their seats. Even in early March, there were news stories about Wendy's entering the breakfast war and a free stock trading app outage that caused people to miss a big market rally.

And that was just in the news. Think about what you busied yourself with at home during that same period. Maybe you and your wife were looking at plans to remodel your kitchen. Maybe you were finally going to pull that trigger on a Tesla Model S for yourself, the $150,000 one with the ludicrous speed package. Maybe you were fuming that Amazon took an extra day to deliver a package. Maybe you were frustrated that your kids' room was a mess. And now, how quaint and stupid does all that seem?

Depending on the day you look years of market gains have been taken back, 47 million people are projected to be added to the unemployment rules. The death count of what was dismissed as a mere respiratory flu or a hoax is now inching towards 170,000.

And there are millions of cases confirmed worldwide. There have been runs on supplies, hospitals and certain countries are maxing out on ventilators. The global economy has essentially ground to a halt. Life comes at us fast, doesn't it? It can change in an instant. Everything you built, everyone you hold dear can be taken from you for absolutely no reason.

Just as easily you can be taken from them. And this is why the Stoics said we need to be prepared constantly for the twists and turns of fortune. It's why Senaqa said that nothing happens to the wise man contrary to his expectation because the wise man has considered every possibility even the cruel and heartbreaking ones.

And yet even Senaqa was blindsided by a health scare in his early 20s that forced him to spend nearly a decade in Egypt to recover. He lost his father less than a year before he lost his firstborn son. And 20 days after burying his son, he was exiled by the emperor. He lived through the destruction of one city by a fire and another by an earthquake before being exiled two more times.

One needs only to read his letters and essays written on a rock off the coast of Italy to get a sense that even a philosopher can get knocked on their ass and feel sorry for themselves from time to time.

What do we do? Well, first knowing that life comes at us fast, we should always be prepared. Senaqa wrote that the fighter 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, only they can go into the ring confident.

And even if they are not confident of their chances of winning, they know that they can take getting bloodied and bruised. They know what the darkness before the proverbial dawn feels like they have a true and accurate sense for the rhythms of a fight and what winning requires.

That sense only comes from getting knocked around that sense is only possible because of their training.

His own life, Senaqa bloodied and bruised himself through a practice called pre-metatoshio malorum, a pre-meditation of evils rehearsing his plan say to take a trip you would go over the things that could go wrong to prevent that trip from happening.

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