The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

You’ve experienced it. Maybe it was after your first semester away at college. Maybe it was after a long trip or a year-long tour of duty. Maybe it’s every time you return to your childhood home for the holidays. Whatever the cause of the absence and wherever the return, we’ve all experienced the truth in the line from the David Fincher movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button:

It’s a funny thing about coming home. Looks the same, smells the same, feels the same. You realize what’s changed is you.

That’s the thing about life. Even as things seemingly stay the same, everything is always changing. Marcus Aurelius speaks beautifully of life as a river’s unending flow. Borrowing from Heraclitus, the Stoics knew that, “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

All is change...including us. You have changed as you read this email, even as the few seconds ticked by. Every experience, everything you read or watch, every conversation you take part in, indeed, every minute that passes changes you.

And yet for all this change, we must continuously return to the timeless principles that remain the same. Like all those famous Stoic practitioners who invariably studied Stoicism until their final breaths. Towards the end of his life, for example, Marcus Aurelius was still reminding himself: “keep returning to it.” That’s why we read and reread and reread Meditations, Letters From A Stoic, and Discourses. That’s why you are in year two or three or four or five or reading The Daily Stoic and these emails.

Though the books, the figures, the lessons never change, you always do...and in this way, you step into this familiar river of wisdom anew. The Daily Stoic