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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 work or to get the kids to school. When 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.

Hello, I'm Hannah and I'm Seruti and we are the hosts of a Redhanded, a weekly True Crime podcast. Every week on Redhanded, we get stuck into the most talked about cases.

From Idaho student killings, the Delphi murders and our recent rundown of the Murdoch saga.

Last year, we also started a second weekly show, Shorthand, which is just an excuse for us to talk about anything we find interesting because it's our show and we can do what we like.

We've covered the death of Princess Diana, an unholy Quran written in Saddam Hussein's blood, the gruesome history of European witch hunting, and the very uncomfortable phenomenon of genetic sexual attraction.

Whatever the case, we want to know what pushes people to the extremes of human behavior. Like, can someone give consent to be cannibalized? What drives a child to kill? And what's the psychology of a terrorist?

Listen to Redhanded wherever you get your podcast. So, and access our bonus shorthand episodes exclusively on Amazon Music, or by subscribing to Wondry Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app.

The important thing is to not be afraid. In scary times, it's easy to be scared. Events can escalate at any moment. There is uncertainty. You could lose your job, then your house, in your car. Something could even happen to your kids.

Of course, we're going to feel something when things are shaky like that. How could we not? Even the Stoics who were supposedly masters of their emotions admitted that we are going to have natural reactions to things that are out of our control.

You're going to feel cold if someone dumps a bucket of water on you. Your heart is going to race to something jumps out from behind a corner.

These are the things the Stoics openly discussed. They had a word for these immediate pre-cognitive impressions, things they called it fantasia.

No amount of training or wisdom, Senika said, can prevent us from having these reactions. What mattered to them and what is urgently needed today in a world of unlimited breaking news about pandemics or collapsing stock markets or military conflicts?

What you did after that reaction, what matters is what comes next. There is a wonderful quote from Faulkner about this very idea. Be scared, he wrote. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.

A scare is a temporary rush of feeling. Being afraid is an ongoing process. Fear is a state of being. The alertness that comes from being startled might even help you. It wakes you up. It puts your body in motion. It's what saves prey from the tiger or the tiger from the hunter.

Fear and worry and anxiety being afraid. That's not fight or flight. That's parallelization that only makes things worse. Especially right now, especially in a world that requires solutions to the many problems we face.

There's certainly not going to solve themselves and in action or the wrong action may make them worse and may put you in even more danger. An inability to learn, adapt or embrace change will too.

There is a Hebrew prayer which dates back to the early 1800s. The world is a narrow bridge, it says, and the important thing is to not be afraid.

The wisdom of that expression has sustained the Jewish people through incredible adversity and terrible tragedies. It was even turned into a popular song that was broadcast to the troops and citizens alike during the Yom Kippur War. It's a reminder, yes, things are dicey and it's easy to be scared if you look down instead of forward.

Fear won't help. What does help training courage discipline commitment calm but mainly that courage thing which the stoics held up as the most essential virtue. One of my favorite explanations of this idea comes from the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield.

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