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Welcome to the Daily Stoke. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life.

Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women.

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Find a good outlet for your passions.

Although today we consider passion to be a good thing, as in, find your passion, to the stoics, the passions were something to be wary of, desire, rivalry, excitement, infatuation, anger.

These are powerful forces that, if left unchecked, were likely to hurt the person who had turned themselves over to them, and likely to hurt innocent bystanders too.

The warning against a manufacturing or feeding these emotional drives is a good one, and ought to be heated.

But what is a person to do when they find themselves unexpectedly angry or hurt or excited? Should they just stuff this emotion down? Should they pretend it doesn't exist?

The stoics talk a lot less about this.

One suspects they might agree with the solution proposed by the beloved children's television host, Mr. Rogers.

He said, but do you know what I do when I'm angry? I like to swim, and so I swim extra hard when I'm angry.

There are many things you can do when you're angry that don't hurt you or anybody else.

What he's talking about is the need for an outlet for the dangerous passions, so we can get them out of our system as soon as possible, with as little harm as possible.

Once the specs, that's why Marcus Arelius was such an avid journalist. He was pouring these passions out onto the page, his temper, his fears, his frustrations.

All of it came out in a practice he knew well, but one can just as easily do this on the basketball court or the swimming pool or into a microphone or onto the keys of a piano.

A politician fueled by anger is going to get themselves in trouble. A politician who runs when they are angry is going to make better policy decisions.

A hurt spouse who gets up and takes a walk and then comes back to the argument later, is going to be more rational, kinder, and less likely to say something they regret.

Passions are inevitable and unavoidable. Life creates them. Life incites them. Still, we can't give ourselves over to them simply because they are natural, or we will hurt ourselves and other people in the process.

Nor can we try to stuff them down in white necklace, like a long quiet fault line or a sleeping volcano on the surface there may be serenity where beautiful things can grow and life can be lived, but under the surface, the tension and the pressure has been building all along and eventually inevitably is going to find a way to vent.

Stuffing down your emotions and your passions only makes it more likely that they'll explode in spectacular life-altering, earth scorching fashion.

We have to find helpful, harmless outlets for our emotions if we want to be able to manage them and avoid seismic, cataclysmic disruptions to our lives.

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