A parent buries a child. A diagnosis upends a life overnight. A storm surge swallows a coastline whole. A family business built over decades burns to ashes in a single day.
We stagger under the weight of these tragedies. We are jarred by circumstances we don't control. Marcus Aurelius was, as we've said. It was one misfortune after another, for him and his family, one bad break after another.
Why? What had he done to deserve this? Why had the gods forsaken him?
Meditations would have been a place for Marcus Aurelius to ask these questions. To pick apart the sheer odds and unlikeliness of the losses and setbacks that befell him. Yet he didn't. Instead, in the pages of Meditations (our favorite copy here) he tells himself not to delve too deeply into such things. He tried to remind himself that he was not in control. That he didn't get a choice. That things had always been like this.
Perhaps he would have related to the most haunting song in Hamilton, where a broken Hamilton reels from the loss of his son and his reputation,
There are moments that the words don't reach There is a grace too powerful to name We push away what we can never understand We push away the unimaginable
What Marcus did was all any of us can do. He put one foot in front of the other. He focused on what he could be grateful for. He gave others the grace he deserved but never received.
This was how he pushed away, how he worked through the unimaginable. And the same can be true for us.
Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Katalin Karikó: Resiliency Will Reward You
They told her she would never succeed. Now her work has saved millions.
On a recent episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan Holiday talked with Dr. Katalin Karikó, the scientist behind the mRNA technology that made COVID-19 vaccines possible. She opens up about her experiences as an immigrant in the U.S., the grind of scientific discovery, and the responsibility of scientists to communicate effectively with the public.
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