We’re Part of This Beautiful Tradition

<p>Do you remember <a href='https://ryanholiday.net/how-dr-drew-pinsky-changed-my-life/'>the first time you heard about the Stoics</a>? Maybe you read about them in another book. Maybe someone you know recommended them to you. Remember that feeling though? When those words first started going through your brain and you felt them in your soul for the first time? It was an incredible experience right? One of the most important and transformative moments in your life. </p><p>Here’s the crazy thing though. Before the Vietnam war, <a href='https://geni.us/R1Tb6b'>James Stockdale</a> had almost that exact experience when he was given a copy <a href='https://dailystoic.com/enchiridion-epictetus/?utm_source=convertkit&amp;utm_medium=convertkit&amp;utm_campaign=beautiful-tradition'>of Epictetus</a> at Stanford. You could roll back the tape of history almost 200 years and find the exact moment that George Washington had his experience when, at 16, a neighbor passed along a copy of the works of the Stoics. Nearly 2,000 years ago almost the exact same thing happened, only instead of America it was in Rome, and a man named Junius Rusticus was loaning <a href='https://dailystoic.com/marcus-aurelius/?utm_source=convertkit&amp;utm_medium=convertkit&amp;utm_campaign=beautiful-tradition'>Marcus Aurelius</a> a copy of Epictetus. A generation before that, someone was introducing Epictetus himself, then no more than a slave, to the works of Musonius Rufus. You could go back further still and sit in a book store and <a href='https://dailystoic.com/zeno/?utm_source=convertkit&amp;utm_medium=convertkit&amp;utm_campaign=beautiful-tradition'>watch Zeno</a>, washed up from a shipwreck, being introduced to philosophy by way of a reading of the works of Socrates. </p><p>It shouldn’t take away from the beauty of your experience to learn that it wasn’t singular. In fact, it enhances it. It ties directly into the most moving passages of Marcus Aurelius, where he points out how long human beings have been doing the same thing, how we’ve been fal