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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 Heart of Living,

which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and a 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 into works.

How well do you know these back roads?

Meditations, you could say, is Marcus Aurelius exploring himself?

That's literally what the title of the book means. The book isn't for you and I.

It's things to oneself, to himself. Marcus is exploring his fears, his desires, his flaws, his virtues.

And that's the journey that philosophy took Marcus on, since he was a young man until right before his death,

he was exploring himself, trying to understand himself and his nature better.

But how about you? How well do you know the back roads of the self, as Marcus calls them in book four?

You know every inch of the ride to work, you know this road or that city you say like the back of your hand.

But how well do you know yourself?

Too many of us are total strangers to ourselves. We seek busyness, we seek external markers,

we seek out others to understand us and demand that they hear what we're saying.

Meanwhile, we ignore the voice inside us.

The one that is whispering to us so many important lessons, the one that is shouting so many warnings.

Well, meditation and journaling and long conversations like the one between Seneca and Lucilius or us via Seneca and his writings.

This is how we get to know ourselves. This is the journey we have to go on because no one can go on it for us.

Because it won't matter where we go in life will be lost if we don't find ourselves first.

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