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“Welcome to the daily stoic podcast designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues”
courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. It is remarkable and very, very lucky that the book survives.
Imagine it was never written for publication. It could have been destroyed by a family member.
It could have been lost to fire or to time as all the writings of Xenoc and Crecipus were, as nearly half the writings of Seneca were. It could have been banned by the church or tucked away and forgotten in some archive, never to be seen again, so that meditation survives is a miracle of history.
“We have in the pages of this little book, the thoughts of the most powerful man in the world.”
We have him ruminating on how to deal with difficult people, how to overcome obstacles,
how to face the inevitability of death. And we have him doing this for his own personal edification, not for posterity or for performance. But we could also say that this is all incredibly misleading as a result. And in fact, that many people have been misled by meditations. They think that Marcus Aurelius is depressing. They think stoicism is dark and joyless, even violent.
But what is written in the pages of meditations is not who Marcus Aurelius was as a person,
“as a friend, as a husband or a father. We have to remember that in meditations, we see only what”
he was struggling with, what he needed reminders of, of what he was trying to cling to in a difficult moment. What was published in meditations you could argue what survives in most of the stoic writings obliterates the full and complex human life behind those words. Because the stoids weren't just leaders and philosophers. They were also parents and spouses and friends who experienced joy who fell in love with cherished the beauty of the world around them. Marcus Aurelius begins as meditations not with stoic doctrine,
but with gratitude for all the people in his life and what they taught him. The whole concept of writing meditations had Donald Robertson, one of Marcus's best biographers. When he was on the daily stoic, Marcus said that it's about following through on this thing, he remembers his mother saying when he was younger, which is to work on his character, to improve his mind and not just his external behavior. And this is one of the many reasons why
meditations hasn't just survived, but has entered all these years. And this month we're celebrating what a miracle that is by helping you live it. We're calling April Marcus Aurelius monthly or meditations month because it's Marcus's 1900th and 5th birthday. And so we've just been doing this deep dive in the meditations. We have this awesome step by step guide sort of a course about meditations if you're interested in reading the book. And then bring me doing a live Q&A.
It's part of that course, which is for everyone who has purchased it. I'll link all of that in today's show notes or just head over to daily stoic.com/meditations.
