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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation

designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life.

Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy

that has guided some of history's greatest men and women

to help you learn from them, to follow in their example,

and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom.

For more, visitdailystoic.com.

Do you know what one of the last things Abraham Lincoln ever said was?

As he sat in a box at Ford's Theater as he waited for the play to start, Lincoln turned to his wife and said, oh, how I should like to visit Jerusalem sometime.

Within minutes, an assassin would fire a bullet into his brain. Within hours, he would be dead.

Now, of course, there were many reasons why this great man

never found time in life to visit Jerusalem. He had to teach himself to read. He had to work himself

out of abject poverty. He had to conquer depression. And then the gravest threat to freedom yet known

in the United States. He freed the slaves and made sure democracy would not perish from

the earth. And these are all reasons why he had to put off that trip till a later date, just as you

have many reasons why you are waiting to do this or delaying doing that. And yet life has a way of

stripping all our reasons bare of humbling our plans and assumptions.

We must live, as Mark Sirelia said, as if death hangs over us, because it does.

We cannot put off till tomorrow, he said, what we can do today, whether that's being good,

our highest priority, or telling people we love them, we're going places we wish to go.

...