The business failure. The blown meeting. The marriage that fell apart. These things didn’t go the way you wanted. It’s frustrating and painful. It’s hard to see anything good about it.
Surely, that’s what Hemingway felt when, as we talked about recently, his entire literary output was lost in one unfortunate incident. Don’t tell me this is ‘good,’ he wrote to Ezra Pound. “I ain’t yet reached that mood.” We can imagine, in fact we know Marcus Aurelius felt similarly about devastating moments in his own life. “It’s unfortunate that this happened,” Marcus writes in one passage in Meditations. He was pitying himself. He was pissed off. But then he corrected himself. “No, it’s fortunate,” he said, “and I’ve remained unharmed by it — not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it.”
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Ryan reminds us of the power that can be found in remembering our mortality, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.
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