Of all the people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only they truly live. Not satisfied to merely keep good watch over their own days, they annex every age to their own. All the harvest of the past is added to their store. Only an ingrate would fail to see that these great architects of venerable thoughts were born for us and have designed a way of life for us.   (Seneca)

JANUARY 19th

WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOUR CHOICE IS

A podium and a prison is each a place, one high and the other low, but in either place your freedom of choice can be maintained if you so wish.  (Epictetus, Discourses, 2.6.25)

A friend gave me a book for my birthday with a thoughtful note, The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday & Stephen Hanselman. It’s a gift that  gives all year with its daily meditations on wisdom and the art of living.  It’s fitting for this particular traveler, who admires the late Stoics, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca. I shared the daily passage above which the authors follow with their own thoughts; the first passage from Seneca is the epigraph for the collection.

The 366 passages are organized into three critical disciplines: perception, action, and will.  The authors devote four months to each.