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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day 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. For more, you can visit us dailystod.com.

How to Be Free

Ruby Doris Smith died at age 25 of cancer.

It was an unfair death concluding a short, unfair life.

For two and a half decades on this earth from 1942 to 1967, Ruby Doris Smith experienced the brutal day-to-day realities of Jim Crow segregation.

Yet her tombstone laments none of this. Instead, it codifies into stone one of the most basic principles of the SNCC, the civil rights organization that she had been so dedicated and active in in her short life.

If you think free, it reads, you are free.

The epigram had a profound double meaning. It means first that the young radical activists of the civil rights movement had decided quite simply that they would refuse to be segregated any longer.

Rejecting the laws of the day as illegitimate, they sat where they wanted for lunch. They wrote buses as they wanted, they organized and marched and lived as they wanted.

And with time, under unrelenting pressure, these laws fell one by one.

But the other meaning of the quote is even more important. Despite all the injustice and the violence and the hatred that surrounded them, these activists strove to embrace the most freeing force there was.

Love. Resetment and reprisal bitterness. Those would have been perfectly understandable emotions for someone like Ruby Doris Smith to have.

They also would have been their own form of slavery.

Epictetus who experienced great cruelty and tyranny during his life in Rome came to the same understanding.

He realized that freedom wasn't about legal status, although that was important. Instead, freedom was a state of mind. It was a choice.

What did it matter if he broke free from his master if he was still ruled by his passions? What good was power if one relinquished the power of the most basic things in life?

Thoughts, sires, opinions. He understood that he had to free himself first if his eventual man, you mission was going to mean something.

And that that was the chief task in life, he would say, to do that. To choose to be free. To think he was free.

And so it goes for us. This is our chief task to however dark the circumstances we must free ourselves.

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