Be Patient With Them | Protect Your Own Good
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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. Be patient with them. When we were kids, life was often overwhelming and bewildering. We would fall asleep in a car seat or a stroller and wake up hours later in a dark room with no idea how we got there. Everything was new.
We had to walk into a classroom for the first time, sit at something called a desk, and stay there all day, away from our parents, learning from strangers. We were constantly being subjected to rules that no one had explained, told to do things that we didn't understand. But ultimately adults understand that it's difficult to be a kid, and that's why we're patient with them, why we take our time to explain things to them, why we don't hold their mistakes or their tantrums against them. But is it really all that different to be an adult? Many of us are still walking into new rooms for the first time, new jobs, new relationships, old relationships with new problems, children of our own to care for, aging parents who now need us in ways they never did before, responsibilities we didn't have yesterday, rules and practices and cultural norms that are constantly changing.
In Marcus Aurelius's famous passage about the obnoxious and rude and frustrating people he knows he'll meet in the course of a day, he makes a really important point. He reminds himself and us why people are like this. They are like this, he says, because they don't know better, because no one taught them. All these things result from their not knowing what is good and what is evil, he writes. And how can I be angry at my kin or even hateful towards them?
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