Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation

designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life.

Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of

history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example,

and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom.

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It's Halloween here in America, which is a fun holiday for children. It's full of mass and

candy and staying up late. In Mexico, however, tomorrow is the beginning of Dia de las Muirtos,

a more adult and philosophical holiday. All throughout Mexico, people will gather not for

treats, but to celebrate and remember their friends and family who have died. It is, in a sense,

a three-day commemoration, the idea of Momentumori, a kind of collective bereavement mixed with

the fun of a jazz funeral. The Great Montana, and if you haven't read his

famous essays or Sarah Bakewell's How to Live, you must. He would tell a story that had trickled back

to him from the new world of an ancient drinking game where the members took turns holding up a

painting of a corpse inside a coffin and cheered, drink and be merry, for when you are dead, you will look like this.

And this cheeky but also profound observation captures the spirit of Dia de los Muertos as well,

with its imagery of skulls and skeletons, the makeup, the music, the dancing, the praying,

the altars set up to honor those who have left.

It may seem strange to celebrate death in this way, and stranger still to involve children in it,

but is it really any stranger than banishing all thoughts of death from our lives and letting

it return to us only as a dreaded nightmare? Or pretending that the one thing that is guaranteed

to happen to all of us doesn't

...