Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues,

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

You must learn to see. It can be an ugly world. It can be a boring world. It can be a world of distraction,

which is why the artist and the philosopher must learn how to cultivate their eyes. In 1940,

the writer James Baldwin was walking in New York City with the painter Buford Delaney, his friend and mentor.

As they crossed the street, Beaufort stopped the young Baldwin.

Look, he said, as he pointed down into the gutter.

What do you see?

All Baldwin saw was a puddle.

Delaney told him to look again, and then he saw, as Nicholas Boggs recounts in Baldwin, a love story,

a reflection of buildings moving like mercury in the gutters black water, distorted and radiant.

It's clear in meditations that someone did this for Mark Surelius.

How else can you explain his beautiful observations of seemingly

ordinary or even unpleasant things? From the way an olive rots on the ground or the foam

flecked on a boor's mouth, what else could explain not just his turns of phrase, but his

ability to find philosophical truths in his own struggles as a human being.

Perhaps it was Rousticus, his philosophy teacher, who taught him this, or Fronto, his

rhetoric teacher, or some poet or writer he met. But in any case, as Baldwin said of Delaney,

the reality of his seeing caused me to begin to see. And so it goes for us. We must cultivate

this ability to see beauty and poetry everywhere because it is everywhere. We must look into the

gutter. We must change our aperture and perspective so that amidst the muddle and puddles of life,

we can see what the artist and the philosopher sees. And in fact, Marcus Aurelius is someone who helped

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