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Welcome to the Daily Stoke podcast each day. We bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes

Illustrated with stories from history

current events and literature to help you be better at what you do and at the beginning of the week

We try to do a deeper dive setting a kind of stoic intention for the week something to meditate on something to think on

Something to leave you with to journal about whatever it is you happen to be doing

So let's get into it

Nothing is possible without this

As you know the Stokes revered for virtues courage temperance justice wisdom

These were extraordinary things according to Marx realized that keystones to a good life

In fact, even their name the cardinal virtues references their pivotal nature cardinal as we've said doesn't refer to a religious position

But instead comes from the Latin Cardos meaning hinge

But of course not all these virtues are created equal courage comes first for a reason as cs. Lewis would write courage is not simply one of the virtues

But the form of every virtue at the testin point there is no justice no self-discipline no wisdom without courage

And the point is not that the Stokes were courageous though they were but rather that there is no

Stoicism without courage

How could Kato have chosen to be so transgressively self-discipline?

Where in no fancy clothes no perfumes attending no tempting feasts

If he was afraid to be seen as something different think of the courage required for Thomas went worth Higginson a translator of

Epictetus to serve at the head of a black regiment for the Union army in the American Civil War a righteous and just cause if there ever was one

You think it wasn't scary for Xeno to found a new philosophical school for nothing

To more or less hang a shingle out in the middle of the agora one morning out of nowhere

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