This Will Save You In Crazy Times | Kindness Is Always The Right Response
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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off

with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com. This will save you in crazy times. How did he stay sane? There was so much pressure, so much work. There was so much bad news, so much death, so much struggle.

And Marcus Aurelius did not have an easy go of it, as we have said. There were floods and famines, wars and betrayals, plagues and difficult people. So where did he find relief? Where did he find goodness and beauty?

in himself, to be sure, as we have talked about many times, but you know where else? Outside. He found it outside. It is clear in meditations that Marcus Aurelius, in addition to his interior explorations, also spent time exploring the natural world too.

We see his poetic observations about wheat bending low under its own weight. We see the way he studied lions and boars, noticing the flecks on one's mouth, the furrowed brow of the other. He was fascinated by the olive groves on his estate, if the multiple metaphors he uses about them are any indication. He loved hot springs and rivers and waves crashing over rocky shores.

Nature nurtured him as it nurtures us, provided him perspective and peace. It humbled him. It inspired him. It calmed him down. It replenished him. Look, the world today is crazy, but the world is also calm and beautiful and nurturing, the outside world that is.

If you are feeling anxious or stressed or overworked, go take a walk. Get outside. Get into nature. Lose yourself in a forest. Bathe in a stream. Look out over a hill and observe the bustle of city life below.

Because the best way to get out of your head, to get outside yourself, is to step outside yourself. Literally, step outside, touch grass, let nature do its quiet, steady work. And that phrase, nature nurtures, actually, I sent a picture to my grandmother, Dolores, about...

a picture of us collecting blackberries out on our ranch, just walking around picking wild blackberries. Our kids were eating them and the sun was setting and she just said, nature nurtures. And I said, that's exactly right. And I just thought about how timeless that is. And obviously that's the idea in Stillness is the Key, which is all about finding stillness in this crazy world.

time. It was crazy when I wrote it in 2018 and 19, mostly more for me and personal reasons, but it's crazy then, it's crazy now. That's a timeless thing throughout history. If you want a signed copy of the book, you can grab that at store.dailystoic.com. I'll link to those in today's show notes. Kindness is always the right response. This is the May 12th entry from The Daily Stoic.

Kindness is invincible, but only when it's sincere, with no hypocrisy or faking. For what even can the most malicious person do if you keep showing kindness, and if given the chance you gently point out where they went wrong? Right, as they were trying to harm you. This is Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, 1118. What if the next time you were treated poorly, you didn't just restrain yourself from fighting back? What if you responded with unmitigated, sincere kindness?

What if you could, as the Bible says, love your enemies and do good to those who hate you? What kind of effect do you think that would have? The Bible says that when you can do something nice and caring to a hateful enemy, it is like heaping burning coals on their head. The expected reaction to hatred is more hatred. When someone says something pointed or mean today, they're expecting you to respond in kind, not with kindness.

And when that doesn't happen, they're embarrassed. It's a shock to their system. It makes them and you better. Rudeness, meanness, cruelty, these are a mask for deep-seated weakness. And kindness in these situations is only possible for people of great strength. You have that strength. Use it. I read a book by James Peck.

who was one of the freedom riders. In fact, the book is called Freedom Rides, but it's his memoir. James Peck was one of the few white freedom riders, one of the early white participants in passive resistance to the horrendous injustice that was segregation and Jim Crow in the American South. And in the book, he talks a handful of times about when he's being beaten. He's attacked all these different occasions and how in the middle of being beaten or

bullied or attacked or whatever, he would often like say something to the person attacking him. Like he'd ask them a question or he wouldn't respond to an insult. He'd say something nice. And how often this was like a record scratch moment. Like in some cases, it would like shake the person out of their sort of spiral of rage and hatred because like

They just expected to get nastiness back. And when they didn't, it didn't always work, of course, but it was like, whoa, what am I doing? Who is it? It kind of like reminded them, oh, this is a human being I'm about to do this to, not this abstraction that I've projected all this stuff to. Nonviolence, of course, is the highest expression of this sort of biblical wisdom, the Christ-like suggestion of turning the other cheek. It's extraordinarily difficult to do.

The people in the civil rights movement, they didn't just hear about this once and then magically become these saints. There was real training. One of the amazing stories, Martin Luther King is attacked on stage as he's speaking to a large leadership conference in the civil rights movement. And he's being beaten by this Nazi, a literal member of the American Nazi Party. And

And the crowd watches like, is he going to fight back? Is he going to lift his hands to protect themselves? And they note the incredible discipline in which Martin Luther King drops his hands, like actually makes himself less defended. Again, that was a lifetime of training and meditation and planning and experience that gets him there. Not unlike the training that a special forces operator would have, you know, under fire.

And then when the person is apprehended, Martin Luther King insists that he not be hurt. He takes him to a back room, not to beat the crap out of him, not to neutralize this threat, which Malcolm X would say he ought to have done. But he has like a pleasant conversation with him. And again, that's a record scratch, like the amount of discipline that that takes.

I'm not asking that of you because I'm not sure I could give it myself. But Seneca's point that, look, everyone we meet is an opportunity for kindness. But to see these moments when we're provoked, when we're attacked, when we are treated unfairly, when we are abused, that makes the kindness all the greater, all the more impressive. And I want you to see that not as a weakness, but as a part of those disciplines of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom.

Martin Luther King realizes that, you know, blacks and believers in racial equality in the United States were hopelessly outnumbered, that the forces of segregation in many cases had control of the police and the military, and that it was insane to try to fight that violence with violence. So he decided to treat it instead with kindness, with grace, with forgiveness, with discipline. And in the end, it was the only thing that made a difference.

I'm not perfect at this. I respond to provocations and insults and attacks. It's never really to my benefit. I almost always regret it. It's not the kind thing to do. It's easy to have a comeback. It's easy to dunk on the idiot who's attacking you. It's therapeutic and cathartic even, but it doesn't help us move forward. It's not...

a great look. It certainly doesn't change their mind. So let's focus today on meeting everyone and everything with kindness, especially, particularly unkindness. Let's meet that kindness with unkindness, see what kind of difference it makes. Let's see who it stops short and whose attention it catches.

Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

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