You Don’t Have to Do It Alone

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 could do it on your own, you could wing it, you could hope to stumble through and come out the other side with a comprehensive understanding of a book that, while pretty short and to the point, is still, as we said earlier this week, pretty difficult. Marcus Aelius, the author of that book we're talking about, Meditations, would steer you in a different direction, though. Mastery of reading and writing requires a master, he said, and he knew this from experience. Sometime around the year one hundred forty AD, Marcus was introduced to the philosophy that would change his life by his teacher Rusticus.

The remembrances of Epictetus, as Marcus would refer most gratefully to that book that Rusticus gave him, he said which he supplied to me out of his own library. We can imagine the underlinings in Rusticus's copy that would have called Marcus's attention to particularly important passages. We can imagine the marginalia that would have provided valuable context and insights. We can imagine the discussions the two might have had as Marcus was familiarizing himself with this wisdom. In fact, Marcus would write in meditations about going straight to the seat of intelligence.

By that he meant asking questions, hearing from the experts, really wrestling with ancient wisdom. as it was meant to be wrestled with. So if we're going to sit down and read Marcus Brelius's meditations today, why wouldn't we do the same? For the past decade here at Daily Stove, we've been engaging with meditations day in and day out, wanting to understand its wisdom so we can apply it to our own lives. We've spent hundreds and thousands of hours with the book itself.

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