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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the

ancient Stoic's 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.

There is no greatness without this. People probably thought Marcus Aurelius was strange.

The time he spent alone in his room, the long walks he took by himself, we know they

thought it was strange that he was seen reading and writing in the Coliseum, ignoring the

carnage of the games below. The world today does not understand an either

man or woman, and Maro Lindberg writes in a gift from the sea. They do not understand

the need to be alone. Perhaps we ourselves don't understand it. We don't quite see the

point, or as much as we enjoy it, we don't see it as much of a priority. As I discussed

over on the Daily Dad podcast and email recently, parents will manage to make time for so

many things, but quiet time for four and by themselves is written off as an impossible

indulgence. But actually Lindberg writes, these are among the most important times in

one's life when one is alone. Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone. The artist

knows that he must be alone to create the writer to work out his thoughts, the musician

to compose the saint to pray. There would be no meditations without this quiet solitude,

or more alarming, there would have been no Marcus Aurelius either. He had to take the

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