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This Should Drive You

Daily Stoic Emails

What kept the Stoics going? Through those dark times, that real and unvarnished understanding of human nature and human life? As we talked about recently, Marcus kept going despite terrible tragedy and loss. Epictetus pushed through terrible injustice. What drove them?

Clearly it was something. They never explicitly said what it was or why…but perhaps that’s because it’s impossible to put into words. Jimmy Carter, who we have written about before, tried to explain when he was president. “I don’t know exactly how to express it,” he said. “I feel I have one life to live. I feel like God wants me to do the best I can with it. And that’s quite often my major prayer. Let me live my life so that it will be meaningful.”

This is the idea Marcus was trying to remind himself when he struggled to get out of bed in the morning (see, Book 5 of Meditations). That he was put on this planet for something…and it wasn’t huddling under the covers. This is what James Stockdale and Viktor Frankl thought about as they languished as prisoners–they wanted to carry on living, not out of basic self-preservation, but because they were intent on transforming their experiences, their suffering into something meaningful.

And it is this that we must think about as we arise each morning, as we struggle in our own lives. We have just one life. How will we spend it? How will we make this day–this existence–meaningful?