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Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation,

but also reading a passage from the book, The Daily Stoic, 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Steve Enhancelman.

And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epititus Markis Relius, Seneca, then some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

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Helping others helps you. Someone wounds you and so you want to wound them back with a harsh remark by cutting them out of the next project,

by putting the word out about them. Maybe they hold an important political view and have done something selfish or mean.

So you want to punish them, you want to shame them, you want to draw attention to their awfulness to send a message.

But anyone who's actually done this, you feel there's something that feels wrong afterwards, you feel dirty, you feel unpleasant, you feel somehow associated, you feel implicated, like you've been dragged down to their level.

The Vietnamese and Zen Buddhist monk Tick Nhat Hanh, who just recently passed away, he cautions us.

He says punishing the other person is self-punishment, and that is true in every circumstance.

And that's why he was a peace activist. That's why he was a non-violent civil rights activist.

And he also found something out in pursuit of those causes and in his journey to enlightenment that helping others is self-help.

His life and his legacy bears this out. Tick Nhat Hanh, who died this past Saturday, was exiled from Vietnam after he published an anti-war poem in 1964.

So how did he respond? He started an organization that rebuilt war-torn villages and reunited war-torn families.

He toured the world to speak out about the people suffering in his country. He became one of the great stewards of Buddhism, making the principles more accessible and applicable to millions of readers worldwide, including myself.

And words of his brave and selfless efforts spread to the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. who would apply what he learned to his own peace movements.

And Marcus really is indeed all the stokes believed that we were part of this large, interconnected organism that you couldn't help another person without helping yourself.

And you couldn't hurt another person without hurting yourself.

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