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. It's a brilliant flash.

Marcus Aurelius was born, and just a few decades later, he was gone.

Cato, Rome's great defender, went down in defeat.

Seneca, for all his power and fame, could not escape Nero's nihilism.

For generations, his important plays, which he so labored over, had their authorship attributed to someone else.

How many schoolchildren today know who Cicero was, or care that Musonius Rufus once had a reputation that rivaled Socrates?

And these are the bold-faced names, the who's-who

of who's that, as we've said. But what about all the forgotten Stoics, who out-out-brief

candle had ordinary basic lives that barely registered? This is sad and tragic. It's also beautiful. We come into existence

by some impossible, unbelievable set of circumstances, and then come out of it. Why? How? No one can say

for certain. But certainly we are here for a period. Isn't that quite wonderful? In Adam Lindsay Gordon's haunting poem

doubtful dreams, he captures something close to the Stoic's bittersweet sense of the human condition.

For the great things of earth are small things, the longest life is a span, and there is an end

to all things, a season to every man, whose glory is dust and ashes,

whose spirit is but a spark, that out from the darkness flashes and flickers out in the dark.

Here we are.

Let's do something with it.

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