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Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation,

but also reading a passage from the book, The Daily Stoic,

365 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Steven Hanselman.

And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epititus Markis Relius,

Seneca, then some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

There's always something else going on. One of the things you quickly figure out with kids, as we have talked about a bunch of times over on our Daily Dad email and podcast,

is that there is always a reason they're behaving a certain way. Your kid is acting crazy because they're tired.

They're having a meltdown because they're actually starting to get sick. Bedtime isn't happening because nap time got skipped.

They're biting because they've been ignored and they know this will get a reaction. And because they're your kids, you love them and feel for them about this.

You don't get upset. You just patiently correct. You give them some food and the tantrum stops.

You get back on the routine and the acting outfades away. It's the life of a parent. You don't look at the symptoms of the problem, you empathize and understand the roots.

But what if we could treat our fellow humans this way? What if we could try to think as Marcus really did about the secret pain that most people had?

Or if we could try to remember, as he does in his famous opening passages about obnoxious people, why they are the way they are because they don't have the training because they don't know what's good.

Epic Titus talked about always grabbing situations from the right handle. Well, which one is better? Getting upset about some flash of behavior or taking time to see what's causing that behavior.

You give your kids the benefit of the doubt. You understand that one meltdown or one bad meal doesn't make them a monster.

What would happen if you could apply that patience and love to your siblings, to your colleagues, to the people you see in the news?

Most people are good. Most people are trying their best. So there's always a reason they're not living in accordance with nature. When they're not being their best, there's almost always something going on from mental health to lack of education to the fact that it's been a tough day.

Understand that. Empathize with it. Try to help.

You can do it. This is the June 10th entry in the Daily Stoic 365 meditations on wisdom, perseverance and the art of living written by yours truly and my wonderful friend and agent Stephen Hanselman.

You can get an audio book of it on Amazon, digital version on Amazon. You can even get a leather bound edition of it in the Daily Stokes store.

I hope you'll like it. We're going through one day a week. We read an entry from the book. I guess in several years, I've made it all the way through the book, but for now we're just doing one day a week. So here we go.

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