You Have To Look This Way | Focus On The Present Moment
The Daily Stoic
Daily Stoic | Backyard Ventures
4.5 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 26 January 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
In the muck and mire of daily life, it’s easy to get frustrated with people. It’s easy to prioritize the wrong things, to lose perspective. It’s easy to get caught up in the moment or forget the actual magnitude of your problems.
Which is why the Stoics remind us to zoom out. At least twice in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius speaks of taking “Plato’s view” and by that he means getting up high and looking down on humanity. “To see them from above,” he writes, “the thousands of animal herds, the rituals, the voyages on calm or stormy seas, the different ways we come into the world, share it with one another and leave it.”
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In today's Daily Stoic Journal excerpt, Ryan examines the power of a mantra through the Marcus Aurelius.
“Erase the false impressions from your mind by constantly saying to yourself, I have it in my soul to keep out any evil, desire or any kind of disturbance—instead, seeing the true nature of things, I will give them only their due. Always remember this power that nature gave you.” —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 8.29”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday we do double duty not just reading our daily meditation |
| 0:09.6 | but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 meditations on wisdom, |
| 0:16.0 | perseverance in the art of living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, |
| 0:20.5 | translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. |
| 0:24.4 | So today, we'll give you a quick meditation |
| 0:26.4 | from the Stoics with some analysis from me, |
| 0:29.5 | and then we'll send you out into the world |
| 0:31.4 | to turn these words in to works. |
| 0:34.0 | You have to look this way. |
| 0:40.0 | In the muck and mire of daily life it's easy to get frustrated with people. |
| 0:46.5 | It's easy to prioritize the wrong things, to lose perspective. It's easy to get caught up in the moment or forget the actual magnitude of your problems, which is why the Stoics remind us to zoom out. |
| 0:57.6 | At least twice in meditations, Mark Surrealist talks of taking Plato's view, and by that he means getting up high and looking down at |
| 1:04.8 | humanity. To see them from above he writes the thousands of animal herds the |
| 1:09.4 | rituals the voyages on calm or stormy seas, the different ways we come into the world, share it with one |
| 1:15.5 | another and leave. How high could Marcus Aurelius have gotten? The tallest mountain in Italy |
| 1:21.2 | is about 15,000 feet, |
| 1:23.2 | and as far as we know he never climbed it. |
| 1:25.4 | Nor do we have any record of Marcus Aurelius scaling his famous column, |
| 1:29.1 | which stood about 40 meters high above Rome. |
| 1:32.2 | So for him, the exercise was theoretical. He was trying to |
| 1:36.0 | imagine what a bird saw looking down, what earth looked like to the stars or the |
| 1:41.0 | clouds. But what he got from this exercise was real humility. |
... |
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