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, everyday life.

Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old

philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest

men and women.

For more, you can visit us, Daily Stoey.

com.

Surrender, but don't give yourself away.

The fact of life is that we're going to get tossed around by forces

outside of our control.

Never forget Fortune's habit of behaving exactly as she

pleases, Seneca reminds us. Never forget that adversity is an inevitability.

There would be war, he said, torture and shipwrecks and exile, along with a lot of less dramatic stuff, like traffic jams and divorces and food poisoning and annoying neighbors in bad weather and pets that run away.

The only option, according to the Stoics, was to submit. No amount of wishing otherwise, no amount of anxiety, no amount of power or wealth would fully protect us from this. We had to surrender to the fates. We had to surrender to the fates to let them guide us, but perhaps we could add to this idea a little

corollary from Cheap Trick. Surrender, but don't give yourself away. Stockdale obviously had to surrender as a POW.

He had to accept his powerlessness,

he had the objective reality of his fate in captivity,

and yet he kept the most important part of himself to himself within himself.

Marcus really accepted the job of the emperor,

which he did not seek out, but there was a part of himself,

the part we read in the pages of meditations,

that it did not allow his professional identity to consume.

...