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

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.

You're an artist whether you know it or not.

Maybe you don't think of Socrates as an athlete, but that's how Epictetus described it.

The man was a ball player, Epictetus said,

catching what life threw at him and throwing it back.

And not easy throws either, but war and pain

and being misunderstood in misunderstood and even eventually

being sentenced to death. Socrates handled this all with the grace and the skill of an

elite athlete. Maybe you don't see yourself as an artist, just like Socrates didn't see himself as an athlete, but maybe you are.

According to Michael Jollette, the founder of the band The Airborne Toxic Event and the author of a fascinating and haunting memoir about his troubled childhood,

he said that we have to take our pain and make it useful.

That's what it means to be an artist. And his own art came from growing up in a

cult that his mother had joined and then living with her series of messed up husbands, struggling

with addictions, getting in trouble at school, not knowing what to do with his own life.

But this struggle ultimately shaped him and in turn shaped the art that he would make.

And Marcus Realis wrote about how we have to turn our obstacles into fuel, that we convert the impediments to action into new operations. to and certainly not easy but it's the only way because life is going to keep throwing stuff at us.

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