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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.

The dance we each will dance. It would be hard to find a deeper, darker, yet more philosophically interesting short film than the silly symphony that Walt Disney produced in 1929.

And while many Disney franchises were built around classic stories and fables, one might have trouble naming one more directly based on an ancient art form than the skeleton dance.

Animated by Disney's most trusted animator, Ubi Works, this six-minute-long absurdist cartoon is a kind of children's version of Memento Mori.

It features a series of skeletons playing music and was surreal and controversial enough in its own time that many theaters refused to show it.

Maybe they didn't get it or they thought it was too morbid. That's understandable, since Walt Disney himself couldn't fully articulate what was so special about it.

It's hard to explain just what we have in mind for this series, he said. But I feel myself that it will be something unusual and should have a wide appeal.

But it's absolutely right, almost 90 years later the film still holds up. And it has had an influential legacy informing other Disney projects like the haunted mansion at Disneyland.

There is even a shop in New Orleans Square in Disneyland called Memento Mori. But should we really expect anything different from something based on an incredibly popular but unusually ancient art form?

After all, the skeleton dance is just a modern interpretation of the Don Smokab, a beautiful, haunting and humbling art form that dates back to the late Middle Ages.

Even the humor and silliness of the Disney take is not new, for centuries artists work to make light of the absurdity and randomness of death, how no one can escape it and how small it renders each of us.

In the Dance of Death print we recreated for DailyStoke.com, which we can get in the Daily Stoke store, which was inspired by a famous German engraving dated to 1635.

The skeleton has an enormous grin on his face. He is laughing at you, looking you in the eye as he does so, and quite possibly asking you to laugh right back.

And of course the operative word in the Dance of Death genre is dance. They're having fun, they're enjoying it, and their enthusiasm is perversely contagious.

After all, we're all in this ridiculous dance we call life and death together.

There's no question that death is ominous. Our mortality is this looming, haunting thing. No matter how good we feel or how strong we are, it turns out we're just a pile of bones that can collapse at a time.

The question is, what are you going to do about this? Are you going to cow or in fear? Pull the covers over your head and hope and vein that death doesn't find you?

Or you're going to bop along with the music and have fun. Why be scared, silly, when being silly is more fun.

And I hope you'll check out the print that we have. You can go to dailystoke.com slash store. It's really cool. We had an awesome illustrator and designer based this on a print that, like we said, is a great idea.

It's almost 500 years old. And I think you'll love it. Just check it out. Go to dailystoke.com slash store. The idea is that you actually hang it at eye level in your home.

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