Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our

daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic. My book, 366 Meditations

on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator,

translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation

from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world

to turn these words into works.

What matters is what you can do in the moment. Epic Titus didn't care what you read. He didn't

care if you'd made it through the densest writings of Chrysipus. Arches really didn't

care what your job was, what your education was, what your authority was, what mattered

was who you were in your actual life. On a recent episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, the

great Sam Harris explained something similar. He said, it didn't matter what peak experiences

you'd had, what insights you'd been able to come up with in meditation, how enlightened

you felt after all the years of practice and study. What really counted, he said, was what

you could muster in the course of ordinary day to day life or more specifically in any one

present moment. He was saying that mindfulness isn't this abstract thing, it isn't some

recreational activity either. Mindfulness is what you're able to draw on when you get distracted

or when you're tempted or when you're cut off in traffic, when you get a bit of terrible

news, when your back pain flares up. Harris wasn't claiming to be perfect at this himself,

nor is he expecting anyone else to. He was just making the point that true stylicism, true

zen, true enlightenment, whatever you want to call it, is something that exists only in the present

moment. It's something that exists right now that you're either drawing on or you're not.

You can talk about your philosophy all you want, as Epictetus said, what matters is the degree

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