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 every day 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 dailystoic.com.

The best stuff is an accidental byproduct.

In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius marbles at nature's inadvertence.

A baker he writes makes the dough needs it and puts it in the oven, then physics the nature

takes over.

The way loaves of bread split open, he writes in Meditations, the ridges are just byproducts

of the baking, and yet pleasing somehow they arouse our appetite without our knowing

why.

It's such a beautiful observation about such a banal part of life, something that only

a poet could see.

So it's worth taking a moment to step back and realize that that sentence, that Marcus

Aurelius's Meditations is itself a kind of meta example of the same phenomenon, a bit

of natures in inadvertence.

Marcus Aurelius' philosophy dictated that he sit down, that he think that he keep ideas

in mind and read and reread about them and talk about them with others and write about

them.

That's what he did day after day, year after year.

Not for us, not for publication, not to impress anyone or to make money, and yet what emerged

...