| The actor Troy Baker has a strange little tattoo on his wrist. II.I. What does that mean? Why is that the first thing he looks at each morning? And what does that have to do with Stoicism? Well, a dedicated reader of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations would recognize the significance immediately. Because it's an allusion to one of the most powerful passages in the entire book. "When you wake up in the morning," per Gregory Hays' translation, "tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own–not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions." Baker decided to get the tattoo after he got into a screaming argument with another actor. They both stormed off the set and went back to their hotels. "Here's the thing," Troy explained in an awesome interview on the Daily Stoic podcast. "I could walk you through, chapter and verse, how I was justified in my anger, justified in my argument. I could point out, chapter and verse, the fallacy of their argument." Troy said he spent the next two days boiling with anger, and then—a longtime student of the Stoics—he remembered that passage. Why was he surprised? Why was he letting them implicate him in ugliness? Why was he working against them instead of with them, turning his back on them? So he got the tattoo as a reminder, and it's been with him ever since, calming him down in frustrating situations with frustrating people. And while we don't have to get that passage permanently inked on our bodies, it wouldn't hurt to keep it always top of mind, to read it every morning.  P.S. Be sure to check out Ryan's full interview with Troy Baker, where the actor discussed how practicing Stoicism enriches the life of the artist and the parent, how a bad breakup and Comic-Con led him to Stoicism, and why he cried reading Meditations for the first time. And if you're looking to dive deeper into Meditations like Troy, we have our premium leather-edition available over at the Daily Stoic Store. Grab your copy today! |
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