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Welcome to the Daily Stoke. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good 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 at DailyStoic.com.

Out of many, one, the model of the United States seen imprinted on its currency and its buildings is e pluribus unum, out of many, one.

It happens that this is also more or less the aim of Stoicism too, to take the many parts of a person and turn them into a unified coherent soul.

Each of us is made up of competing desires and impulses and needs, yet all of this is part of who we are. More importantly, with work and study, philosophy is designed to integrate and order all of this into its proper place within us.

On a larger level, Stoicism as a kind of civic religion in Rome was designed to take the many and turn them into one thing.

Aromant, Seneca was from Cordoba, Epictetus was from Herapolus, Marcus was from Rome proper. These are diverse and far-flung places, each had their own spin and their own style, and yet they became a part of a larger whole of Stoicism in the Roman Empire.

It was their notions of duty and responsibility and their sense of right and wrong that made this happen, that aligned interests and beliefs and lifestyles.

If you step back even further, you can see how we ourselves are melded in and absorbed into this larger tradition and process.

Time and distance and technology collapse, temporal and geographic and cultural boundaries so that we may become one, part of the same whole that even the ancient Stoics were a part of.

This is sympathy on the individual and the macro level. Unfortunately, we are losing that unifying thrust these days.

As the documentarian Ken Burns has joked, there is too much polaribus and not enough unum. There is too much focus on our individual cells and our differences and not what we hold in common or what joins us together.

This is a tragedy. It causes needless strife and conflict, which is why today, as you walk the streets or the halls of your office, think about this process.

The way we can become part of something larger than ourselves, what we share in common and what we can do for each other. Unity is better than division. Many is better than one only when the many become one, and it starts with you.

At Daily Stoke, we think that every leader and citizen should think deeply about this idea of sympathy yet. We were made for each other and to serve a common good was how Marcus put it.

That's why we made our sympathy a challenge coin or a medallion which can serve as a practical, tangible reminder of the causes and the larger whole we are all members of.

Please check it out, the Daily Stoke Storks, one of the things I carry with me every day and I hope that you will too.

Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke early and add free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music App today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.