Choose to See What It Gave You
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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. Parenting can present us some of our greatest tests. Your son has dyslexia, your oldest has behavioral issues, the youngest is on the spectrum, your daughter has a chronic health issue, your kid has trouble regulating emotions. These are challenges, to be sure, challenges for you, challenges for them. It's not easy and it's not cheap.
There are accommodations you'll have to make, there will be things you need to buy, there will be things that you and they will not get to do. There will be heartbreak, heartbreak that both Marcus Aurelius and Seneca experienced after the devastating loss of their own children far too young. But as always, the Stoics remind us that everything has its compensation, if we choose to see it, if we choose to welcome it. The challenges we face as parents become our greatest teachers and guides. You'll have moments at the dialysis center that years from now you wouldn't trade for anything.
You'll develop patience and resilience that you could not have otherwise imagined, and they will too. You will learn how to advocate for yourself and for them. You'll come face to face with this thing called acceptance. You will understand what it means to love, to really love unconditionally. This thing with your kid, you wouldn't have wished for it, you wouldn't have wished it on them, or indeed on any other parent, and yet you are coming to see that it gave you something, gave you perspective on what truly matters, on what real strength looks like.
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