Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday we do double duty not just reading our daily meditation

but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 meditations on wisdom,

perseverance in the art of living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator,

translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman.

So today, we'll give you a quick meditation

from the Stoics with some analysis from me,

and then we'll send you out into the world

to turn these words in to works.

The pages were a safe space, a place away from the intrigues of court, a place away from war and death and pestilence,

a place to process his stress, his anxieties, and his fears.

We can see in meditations what meditations was doing for Marcus Aurelius.

It was doing what journaling can do for all of us. Give us space to think, space to calm down,

space to get perspective, space to be grateful, space to remind ourselves of what's important.

It's also interesting though to see that Mark Surreis was tough on himself in his journal too.

They didn't just use the space to snipe at others or judge them.

He was also asking himself some hard probing questions.

What am I doing with my soul? he asked in book five.

And then he says that he that you need to

interrogate yourself to find out what inhabits your so-called mind and what kind of soul you

have now. A child soul, he says, in adolescence's a tyrant soul the soul of a predator or its prey

Marcus realist was an all-powerful emperor no one was interrogating him no one else was

subjecting him to these tough questions.

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