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STOP LIVING AHEAD | 10 Stoic Lessons to Reclaim Your Present Calm · Stoic Mindset: Awakened

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: You are exhausted by a future that has not happened
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  Speaker 1: and may never come. Think about that for a moment.
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  Speaker 1: Not the exhaustion that comes from hard work, from showing up,
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  Speaker 1: from giving something real to something real. This is a
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: different kind of tired. This is the bone-deep weariness of
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: a mind that has been living somewhere else, running scenarios
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: that haven't started, defending against emergencies that haven't been declared,
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  Speaker 1: mourning losses that haven't occurred. You wake up already behind,
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: already heavy, already carrying the weight of a day that
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: does not yet exist. You go to sleep rehearsing a
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  Speaker 1: version of tomorrow that lives entirely inside your head, and
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: somewhere in the middle, in the actual hours of the
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  Speaker 1: actual life you have been given, you drift through present
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: moments like a visitor, never fully landing, never fully here.
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  Speaker 1: You dread things that are weeks away with the same
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  Speaker 1: intensity as things that are seconds away. You lie awake
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  Speaker 1: turning possibilities into certainties. You sit in rooms where conversations
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  Speaker 1: are happening, where real people are speaking real words and
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: And you are somewhere else entirely, running projections, calculating disasters,
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  Speaker 1: scanning the horizon of a future that may never arrive
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: in the shape you have given it. Your body is present.
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  Speaker 1: Your strength is not. And here is what I want
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  Speaker 1: you to hear first, before anything else. This is not
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  Speaker 1: a character flaw. This is not proof that you are
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: weaker than others. This is a trained reflex, a pattern
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  Speaker 1: the world has quietly rewarded for years, because it looks
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  Speaker 1: so much like responsibility. It looks like planning. It looks
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  Speaker 1: like care. The person who worries about tomorrow is praised
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  Speaker 1: as someone who takes life seriously. The person who lies
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: awake with a racing mind is told they simply care deeply.
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  Speaker 1: And so the habit grows roots. And the roots go deep.
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  Speaker 1: And after a while, you stop questioning it because it
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: feels like vigilance. And vigilance feels like virtue. But we
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: need to be honest with each other today. The real
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  Speaker 1: cause of this exhaustion is not the future itself. The
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  Speaker 1: future does not touch you. Only the present can do that.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: The real cause lives inside a belief you have been
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  Speaker 1: carrying without examining. The belief that imagining disasters is the
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: same as preparing for them. That rehearsing suffering is the
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: same as building strength. It is not. And somewhere beneath
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: the noise of all those forward projections, you already sense that.
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  Speaker 1: That is why you are here. If you have ever
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: lost a real day, a whole, living, irreplaceable day, to
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  Speaker 1: a future that never came, this is for you. If
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: you have ever finished a week and felt you were
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: not quite in it, like you watched it from a
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  Speaker 1: slight distance, like the best of you was always somewhere else,
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  Speaker 1: this is for you. If you have ever recognized yourself
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  Speaker 1: as the person whose mind is always one step ahead
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: of their own life, never resting in the moment they
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: have actually been handed, this is absolutely for you. Here
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  Speaker 1: is what today holds. Ten lessons, drawn from ten minds
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  Speaker 1: who thought harder and more clearly about this than almost
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  Speaker 1: anyone in human history. Ten ways to return your strength
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: to where it actually lives, which is here and now,
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  Speaker 1: and in the only moment that is ever truly real.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: The Stoics were not soft people. They were not people
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: who told you to relax and breathe. and let the
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  Speaker 1: world be beautiful. They were people who faced exile, illness,
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  Speaker 1: political ruin, and personal loss, and who developed, through all
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  Speaker 1: of that, a philosophy of presence so strong it held
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  Speaker 1: them together in conditions that would unmake most of us.
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  Speaker 1: What you will find today is not a list of
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  Speaker 1: calming tricks. It is training for your mind and your character.
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  Speaker 1: It is a return to inner ground that was always yours,
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  Speaker 1: and that you have been leaving, day after day, without
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  Speaker 1: knowing the full cost of the leaving. Stay to the end.
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  Speaker 1: What you carry away is simple, and it is absolute.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: Calm is not something you earn when the future finally cooperates.
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  Speaker 1: Calm is something you claim right now, in the present moment,
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  Speaker 1: as the ground you stand on. That is the discovery,
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  Speaker 1: and it is available to you today. Before we begin,
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  Speaker 1: I want to ask you to do one thing. Write
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  Speaker 1: this phrase in the comments right now, before you listen
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  Speaker 1: to another word. Write, I am fully present in this day,
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  Speaker 1: not as a wish, not as a goal. not as
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  Speaker 1: something you hope to become. Write it as a declaration,
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  Speaker 1: as a stake driven into the ground of this moment.
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  Speaker 1: Writing it means you are here. Writing it means that
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  Speaker 1: some part of you has already chosen today over the
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  Speaker 1: endless rehearsal of tomorrow. It is your anchor for everything
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  Speaker 1: that follows. Write it now, and then stay with me.
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  Speaker 1: Let's begin. Lesson one. Your worry is not a map.
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  Speaker 1: Worry is attention, abandoning the present, not intelligence protecting the future.
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  Speaker 1: Hear that. And let it sit. Because the story you
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  Speaker 1: have been telling yourself is that when you worry, you
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  Speaker 1: are doing something useful. You are thinking ahead. You are
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  Speaker 1: being responsible. You are protecting yourself and the people who
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  Speaker 1: depend on you. But worry is not that. Worry is
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  Speaker 1: your attention leaving the room where your actual life is
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  Speaker 1: happening and traveling forward into territory that does not yet
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  Speaker 1: exist to rehearse outcomes you cannot control in a space
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  Speaker 1: where none of your real strength can follow. The present
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  Speaker 1: moment goes dry. The actual work, the actual relationships, The
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  Speaker 1: actual decision sitting right in front of you. All of
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  Speaker 1: it waits, unwatered, while your mind floods somewhere else. Picture
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  Speaker 1: it this way. Imagine a river that has been redirected
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  Speaker 1: entirely away from the land it was meant to nourish.
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  Speaker 1: All of its force, all of its water, sent upstream
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  Speaker 1: into an empty field that has no crops, no roots,
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  Speaker 1: no use for the water at all. The field the
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  Speaker 1: river was supposed to feed sits cracked and waiting. The
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  Speaker 1: river pours its full strength into nothing. That is what
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  Speaker 1: worry does with your attention. Every loop your mind runs
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  Speaker 1: on a scenario that hasn't arrived is water sent to
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  Speaker 1: an empty field. The real ground of your life, this hour,
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  Speaker 1: this task, this person in front of you, goes without.
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  Speaker 1: How many times this week alone did you spend real
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  Speaker 1: energy on a scenario that never once materialized? Not a
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  Speaker 1: rough estimate. Actually count, if you can bear to. And
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  Speaker 1: when you worried, when you ran those loops and rehearsed
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  Speaker 1: those failures and calculated those disasters, did any of it
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  Speaker 1: change the outcome? Or did it only change you? leaving
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  Speaker 1: you smaller, tighter, more depleted, closer to the edge, less
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  Speaker 1: available for the moment you are actually in. Example. Here
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: is what this looks like in an ordinary day. There
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: is a deadline two weeks away. The work is manageable,
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  Speaker 1: the task is real, the preparation needed is straightforward. But
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  Speaker 1: every evening, instead of doing the work or resting from
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  Speaker 1: the day, you spend hours running a mental rehearsal of
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  Speaker 1: being found inadequate, of being exposed, of losing everything attached
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  Speaker 1: to that single moment. The actual work sits untouched. the
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  Speaker 1: actual hours pass. And two weeks later, you arrive at
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  Speaker 1: the deadline not more ready, but more worn, having paid
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  Speaker 1: in advance for a catastrophe that likely never came. Here
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  Speaker 1: is the law. Worry is not preparation. Planning is preparation.
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  Speaker 1: Planning is deliberate, it is targeted, it is done, and
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  Speaker 1: then it is finished. Worry is something else entirely. Worry
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  Speaker 1: is rehearsal without a stage. It consumes the same energy
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  Speaker 1: as action. It occupies the same interior space as real thought,
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  Speaker 1: but it produces nothing real. Not a single worried hour
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  Speaker 1: has ever solved the problem it was spent on. This
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  Speaker 1: is the truth that does not bend. Marcus Aurelius wrote,
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: Confine yourself to the present. Four words from a man
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  Speaker 1: who governed an empire, commanded armies and buried children, and
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  Speaker 1: still found that the discipline of staying present was the
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  Speaker 1: central one. Not the easiest, but the central. What he understood,
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  Speaker 1: and what the Stoics as a school taught without exception,
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  Speaker 1: is that your strength has an address, and that address
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  Speaker 1: is now. The moment you leave it, you take your
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  Speaker 1: strength with you into territory where it cannot be used.
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  Speaker 1: Here is what you do. First, learn to notice the
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  Speaker 1: exact moment your mind crosses from planning into looping, from
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  Speaker 1: useful preparation into purposeless rehearsal. There is a line. You
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  Speaker 1: can feel it. Second, when you cross it, name it aloud,
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  Speaker 1: even quietly to yourself. Say, this is dread, not strategy.
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  Speaker 1: Name it for what it is, not what it pretends
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  Speaker 1: to be. Third, take one deliberate breath and return your
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  Speaker 1: attention to what is actually in front of you right now.
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  Speaker 1: The screen, the task, the person, the room. One breath.
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  Speaker 1: one return. Tell yourself, worry is not foresight, it is
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  Speaker 1: attention leaving without permission. This is who you become when
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  Speaker 1: you practice this. Not a person without concerns, not someone
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  Speaker 1: who ignores real problems, but someone whose attention is no
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  Speaker 1: longer hijacked without their knowledge. You become someone who sees
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  Speaker 1: the loop forming and chooses something different. The quality of
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  Speaker 1: your work changes. The quality of your presence changes. The
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  Speaker 1: quality of the life you are actually living changes, because
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  Speaker 1: you are in it, Finally and fully, rather than always
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  Speaker 1: half gone. Carry this line with you. Worry is not
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  Speaker 1: a map. It is a detour into a country that
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  Speaker 1: does not exist. And every time you turn back, you
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  Speaker 1: find yourself in the only country where anything you love
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  Speaker 1: is actually waiting. There is a question underneath all of this, though.
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  Speaker 1: If worry is not a map, what do you do
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  Speaker 1: with the fear that drives it? What lives beneath the looping?
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  Speaker 1: That is exactly where we go next. Lesson two. You
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  Speaker 1: have already lived the worst version. The mind that rehearses
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  Speaker 1: suffering pays the price twice, and once is always enough.
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  Speaker 1: You have been paying double for years. That is the
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  Speaker 1: truth underneath this lesson. Every catastrophe you have run in
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  Speaker 1: full detail inside your mind, every disaster you have felt
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  Speaker 1: in your chest as though it had already arrived, every
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  Speaker 1: failure you have pre-experienced in the dark hours of a
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  Speaker 1: night that had done nothing to deserve it, all of
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  Speaker 1: that has a cost, a real cost, a cost measured
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  Speaker 1: in peace, in presence, in the actual quality of your
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  Speaker 1: interior life. And the thing about that cost is this.
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  Speaker 1: It is charged regardless of whether the catastrophe ever shows up.
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  Speaker 1: You pay in full either way. Consider this common situation.
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  Speaker 1: Think of a musician standing in the wings before a
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  Speaker 1: performance and imagine that in every practice session leading up
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  Speaker 1: to that night, they rehearsed only the mistakes, only the
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  Speaker 1: drop notes, the wrong entrances, the moments of forgetting. They
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  Speaker 1: practiced the wrong version so many times and with such
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  Speaker 1: focus that those notes are the ones that live in
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  Speaker 1: the muscle, in the memory. When the performance begins, the
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  Speaker 1: mistakes are the most familiar thing. The mind greets them
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  Speaker 1: like old friends. That is what pre-suffering does. It does
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  Speaker 1: not prepare you for the worst. It installs the worst
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  Speaker 1: as the expected reality. How many catastrophes have you lived
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  Speaker 1: through in full detail, with full emotional cost, that never
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  Speaker 1: once materialized? How many griefs have you carried for losses
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  Speaker 1: that never came? How many mornings arrived after nights of
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  Speaker 1: rehearsed disaster to find an ordinary day waiting? The crisis
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  Speaker 1: still hypothetical. The emergency still invented. And what did all
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  Speaker 1: of that rehearsed suffering actually protect you from? Name one thing.
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  Speaker 1: Name one outcome that changed because you suffered it in advance.
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  Speaker 1: I know the argument. I know what the restless part
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  Speaker 1: of you says in response. That imagining it makes the
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  Speaker 1: shock smaller if it actually comes. That pre-suffering is a
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  Speaker 1: kind of emotional insurance. But Seneca wrote, We suffer more
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  Speaker 1: in imagination than in reality. He was not offering comfort.
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  Speaker 1: He was stating a law. The real event, if it comes,
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  Speaker 1: arrives in a specific form, at a specific moment, with
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  Speaker 1: specific resources available to meet it. The imagined event is infinite.
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  Speaker 1: It has no specific form, no edges, no limit. And
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  Speaker 1: you meet it with nothing, because it is not real
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  Speaker 1: enough to bring your real strength to bear, only real
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  Speaker 1: enough to drain it. Pre-suffering does not soften real pain.
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  Speaker 1: It only guarantees a present one, not the imagined future pain,
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  Speaker 1: which may never arrive, but the real, present, actual cost
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  Speaker 1: of having spent this day, this hour, this life, inside
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  Speaker 1: a version of events that never came to pass. The
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  Speaker 1: Stoics taught that suffering the possible is the most wasteful
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  Speaker 1: form of suffering there is, because it is optional, because
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  Speaker 1: it is chosen, and because it costs everything without returning
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  Speaker 1: anything at all. Your practice is this. Take a moment
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  Speaker 1: and write down three things you feared most in the
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  Speaker 1: past month, three scenarios you ran in full. Three disasters
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  Speaker 1: you pre-lived with complete emotional commitment. Now go through them
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  Speaker 1: and mark which ones actually arrived. Not in a diminished form,
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  Speaker 1: not in a milder version, but the full catastrophe you constructed.
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  Speaker 1: Look at the blank spaces beside the ones that never came.
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  Speaker 1: Let those blank spaces speak. Let them show you, in
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  Speaker 1: plain terms, exactly what you paid and exactly what you
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  Speaker 1: received for the payment. Say this. The disaster you rehearse
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  Speaker 1: is the only one guaranteed to cost you something. This
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  Speaker 1: is what opens when you choose it. When you stop
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  Speaker 1: funding imagined disasters, you find that your emotional resources are
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: not depleted before the day begins. You find that fear,
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: when it is real, can be met with something real.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: You find that your presence is not divided between what
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: is happening and what might happen. You find, perhaps for
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: the first time in a long time, that the day
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  Speaker 1: in front of you is livable, and that you have
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  Speaker 1: enough for it. Not someday. Today. Let this be the
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  Speaker 1: one you return to. The blank spaces in your ledger
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  Speaker 1: of feared futures are not evidence that you worried enough
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  Speaker 1: to ward them off. They are evidence that the mind
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  Speaker 1: exaggerates threat, that most of what you have paid for
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  Speaker 1: was never charged to you by the world, only by yourself.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: And if most of the disasters you rehearsed never landed,
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  Speaker 1: then there is a question worth sitting with. Why do
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  Speaker 1: you keep funding them? Why does the mind keep allocating
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  Speaker 1: its force to futures that mostly never arrive? That is
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  Speaker 1: the ground we move on to next. Lesson four, draw
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  Speaker 1: the line between yours and not yours. anxiety grows exactly
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  Speaker 1: as large as the territory you claim that was never
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  Speaker 1: yours to own. Here is what this looks like in
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  Speaker 1: every restless mind. You pick up a worry about something
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  Speaker 1: happening three weeks from now, something involving other people's decisions,
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  Speaker 1: market forces, another person's mood, the outcome of a process
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  Speaker 1: you submitted and walked away from, and you carry it.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: You roll it around all day as though you're carrying
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: it as doing something, as though the act of holding
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  Speaker 1: a thing you cannot move is somehow holding it in place.
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  Speaker 1: It is not. It is only exhausting you. It is
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  Speaker 1: dividing your attention between the field where you are standing
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  Speaker 1: and a storm happening in a county you will never govern.
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: Picture a gardener. This gardener has beds, actual beds with
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  Speaker 1: soil and seeds and roots that need water and tending
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  Speaker 1: right now. But instead of mealing in those beds, the
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  Speaker 1: gardener stands at the fence, staring at the weather forming
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: over distant hills, watching clouds that belong to another region entirely,
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: calculating what that weather might mean. Meanwhile, the beds dry out.
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  Speaker 1: The seedlings quietly give up. The garden that was actually
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: theirs to tend goes unattended because their eyes and their
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: worry were committed to a sky they had no agreement
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  Speaker 1: with and no power over. That is you when you
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  Speaker 1: carry what is not yours. That is your mind treating
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  Speaker 1: borrowed territory as though it were a debt you personally owe.
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  Speaker 1: Ask yourself this right now, not later. Which of the
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  Speaker 1: worries you are holding today actually live within your reach?
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  Speaker 1: Which of them could you touch, adjust, respond to, act
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  Speaker 1: on in the next hour and which exist entirely beyond
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  Speaker 1: your hands and your eyes, out there in the hands
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  Speaker 1: of others, in the motion of systems, in futures that
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: belong to no one yet. Here is what this looks
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: like in an ordinary day. You wake up, and the
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: first thing your mind does is reach, not toward the morning,
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  Speaker 1: but toward outcomes you do not control. A conversation someone
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  Speaker 1: else might have about you. A number that will move
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  Speaker 1: without your permission. An event that depends entirely on variables
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: outside your door. You spend the first hour of your
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: day already dispersed across a dozen territories that were never yours.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: And then you wonder why you feel thin. Why you
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: arrive at your actual work already worn. Why the tasks
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  Speaker 1: in front of you feel hard before you have even
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  Speaker 1: touched them. It is not a mystery. You divided your
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: force before the day had a chance to ask for it.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: Here is the law. Claiming what is not yours does
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  Speaker 1: not protect you. It does not protect you. It does
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  Speaker 1: not prepare you. It does not give you any advantage
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  Speaker 1: over the thing you fear. It only divides your force,
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  Speaker 1: and a divided force accomplishes half of everything and none
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  Speaker 1: of it well. This is the truth that does not bend.
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  Speaker 1: The size of your anxiety is not a measure of
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  Speaker 1: the size of the threat. It is a measure of
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  Speaker 1: how far outside your actual territory your mind has wandered.
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  Speaker 1: Epictetus taught, Make the best use of what is in
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  Speaker 1: your power, and take the rest as it happens. Read
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  Speaker 1: that again slowly. Make the best use of what is
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  Speaker 1: in your power. That is a complete and total instruction,
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  Speaker 1: not some of what is in your power. Not what
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  Speaker 1: is in your power after you have also worried about
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  Speaker 1: everything else. What is in your power fully, completely, as
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  Speaker 1: the whole occupation of your strength. And then, take the
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  Speaker 1: rest as it happens. Not dread the rest. Not rehearse
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  Speaker 1: the rest. Let it arrive on its own terms, and
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  Speaker 1: meet it when it does. The Stoics taught that the
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: dividing line between your reach and everything outside it is
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  Speaker 1: not a line of defeat. It is a line of liberation.
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  Speaker 1: It is the line that gives you back yourself. Here
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  Speaker 1: is what you do. First, Take a moment now and
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: list what is actually worrying you today. Write it down
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  Speaker 1: if you can. Every active concern that is sitting on
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  Speaker 1: your chest. Every loop your mind is running. Second, draw
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  Speaker 1: a line through that list. On one side, everything that
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  Speaker 1: is genuinely yours. Things you can touch, adjust, respond to,
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  Speaker 1: decide about today. On the other side, everything that is not.
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  Speaker 1: Everything that belongs to other people's choices. To time you
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  Speaker 1: cannot enter yet. To outcomes no amount of your worry
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  Speaker 1: will alter. Third, release the second column completely. Not temporarily.
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  Speaker 1: Not until you check on it again in an hour.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: Release it and spend the next hour working only inside
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: the first. Sorting what is yours from what is not
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: is the whole work. Say this until it settles. Sorting
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: what is yours from what is not is the whole work.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: Not the beginning of the work. Not a step towards
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: something more sophisticated. The whole work. Everything follows from that
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: single act of honest division. My strength belongs to now.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: This is who you become When you stop claiming borrowed territory,
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: you stop arriving at your real responsibilities already depleted. You
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: find that the worries you release do not crush you.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: They simply continue without you, as they always would have.
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: You find that what remains on your side of the
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: line is manageable, because it was always designed to be
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: managed by one person, by you, with the force you
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: actually have. You find that the relief is not irresponsibility,
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: it is proportion. And proportion is the first face of calm.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: Carry this line with you. Anxiety grows exactly as large
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: as the territory you claim that was never yours to own.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: Draw the line, stay inside it, and find out what
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: your actual force can do when it is no longer
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: scattered across a country that was never on your map.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: Lesson 5. You will have what you need when you
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: need it. The strength you will require tomorrow is not
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: missing today. It simply has not been called yet. Here
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: is how this fear works in you. You look at
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: what might be coming, the difficult conversation, the hard seasons,
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: the uncertain outcome. And instead of asking what today needs
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: from you, you ask whether future you will be adequate
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: to future problems. And because you cannot see future you clearly,
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: because that version of yourself is still forming, still untested
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: by the thing that has not arrived, your mind fills
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: the gap with doubt. You decide, before the evidence is in,
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: that you will not be enough. And that decision, made
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: in advance, in the absence of any actual test, becomes
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: its own kind of suffering, not a real suffering, A
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: borrowed one. Imagine a bridge builder who has not yet
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: laid the first plank of the bridge. They stand at
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: the edge of one shore, looking out over the water,
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: and they cannot see the opposite bank. The fog is thick.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: The distance is uncertain. And instead of beginning, instead of
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: working from what they can see and reach today, they
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: stand in a kind of paralysis, consumed by the question
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: of whether the materials will hold, whether the distance is
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: too great, whether they will have enough when they finally
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: arrive at the middle. The bridge does not advance. The
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: work does not happen. and the fear of what might
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: be true at the far end prevents anything true from
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: being built at the near end. That is what you
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: do every time you doubt future capacity before you have
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: even started using present capacity. You leave the shore of
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: today entirely to panic about a bank you cannot yet see.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: Think of the hardest thing you have already come through.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: not a small difficulty, the real one, the one you
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: were certain you were not equipped for before it arrived.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: What did you bring to it? What did you discover
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: in yourself in that moment that you had no idea
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: was there, that you had not rehearsed, had not prepared,
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: had not expected to find? And now ask yourself this,
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: why do you trust tomorrow's problems to be as bad
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: as you imagined but refuse to trust tomorrow's version of
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: you to be as capable as you already know you
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: can be. Consider this common situation. You have something ahead
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: of you, weeks or months out, that your mind has
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: decided is beyond you. You lie awake constructing the failure
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: in advance. You tell yourself, I will not handle this well.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: I will be exposed. I will not have what it takes.
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: And so the present day is mortgaged to the worry
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: of a future inadequacy that has not been tested by
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: anything real yet. Meanwhile, your actual strength sits unused in
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: the present. waiting for you to call on it, waiting
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: for you to give it something real to do. Here
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: is the law. You were enough before. In every instance
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: you can recall, even when you did not believe you
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: would be, you found something in yourself that rose to
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: meet what arrived. The evidence is not a feeling. The
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: evidence is that you are still here. Mark this as fact.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: Pre-doubt in your future self does not make you more prepared.
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: It makes you less capable today because it spends in
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: anxiety the very force that future difficulty will need. Marcus
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: Aurelius wrote, Never let the future disturb you. You will
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: of reason which today arm you against the present. The
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: same weapons. That is the key. Not new weapons. Not
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: better weapons that you do not yet possess. The same clarity,
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: the same capacity, the same resilience that is yours today
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: will be yours when tomorrow asks for it. The Stoics
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: taught that the self is not a different self in difficulty.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: It is the same self, called to a higher demand.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: And the self that learns to face today fully is
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: precisely the self that will rise to what is waiting ahead.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: You already hold everything needed for what has not yet arrived.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: Say that again to yourself. You already hold everything needed
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: for what has not yet arrived. Your practice is this.
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: Right now, or at the first quiet moment you have today,
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: write one sentence. One sentence about a difficulty you came
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: through without the preparation you thought you needed. Not a paragraph.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: One sentence. Something like, I did not know how I
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: would handle that, and I handled it. Keep it where
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: you can reach it. And the next time your mind
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: starts the spiral of future inadequacy, read it before you
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: let the spiral go one more rotation. Because one sentence
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: of actual evidence is worth more than a thousand rotations
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: of imagined failure. You already hold everything needed for what
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: has not yet arrived. This is what opens when you
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: choose it. When you stop doubting future you in advance,
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: you free today to be something other than a waiting
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: room for dread. You find that the energy you were
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: spending on pre-construction of your own inadequacy is now available,
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: right now, for actual strength. You find that your confidence
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: is not arrogance and not denial. It is historical accuracy.
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: It is knowing, because your own record tells you that
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: when the moment comes you will bring what it needs.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: Let this be the one you return to. The strength
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: you will require tomorrow is not missing today. It simply
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: has not been called yet. Trust the call. Trust what answers.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: Lesson six. Count what worry has already taken. Time spent
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: in tomorrow Is time permanently subtracted from today? Here is
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: the cost nobody names out loud. You've been losing hours,
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: not to rest, not to connection, not to any form
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: of replenishment, to forward dread that produces nothing, builds nothing,
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: protects nothing. And because the loss is invisible, because there
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: is no receipt, no record, no moment where you signed
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: something over, you have been paying it without noticing. You
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: have given whole afternoons and whole conversations and whole meals
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: to a future that never arrived to claim them. And
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: what you were actually in The actual room, the actual
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: person across the table, the actual food in front of you,
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: slipped past unnoticed because you were not there. Look at
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: this image. A clock whose hands are bent forward, perpetually
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: angled toward a face that keeps sliding ahead of them.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: The hands never land on any actual hour. They are
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: always chasing the next one. They cannot tell the time
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: that exists because they are permanently aimed at a time
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: that does not exist yet. That is the mind that
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: lives in tomorrow. It is present in body, in location,
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: in physical terms, but its actual attention is always bent
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: toward an hour that keeps moving away. The clock runs,
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: the time passes, and nothing is ever truly marked. Ask
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: yourself honestly, last week, how many conversations were you physically
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: in but mentally two days ahead of? How many times
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: were you in the same room as something that mattered,
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: a question being asked, a moment being offered, a person
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: reaching toward you, and your mind was already running calculations
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: about something that had not happened and might never happen?
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: What did you miss? what passed through your hands unnoticed
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: because your hands were already full of tomorrow. Here is
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: what this looks like in an ordinary day. You sit
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: down for a meal and before the first bite, your
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: mind is already at a task that belongs to this evening.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: The meal becomes fuel consumed without presence. You are in
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: a conversation and someone says something that matters, something they
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: are genuinely offering. And you hear the surface of it
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: but not the depth because your attention is already on
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: the next thing. The thing after this, the thing two
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: things from now. And then later, You wonder why you
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: feel disconnected. You wonder why the day felt thin. Why
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: nothing seems to have landed. It did not land because
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: you were not there to receive it. Here is the law.
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: Drifting forward is not something that simply happens to a
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: passive mind. It happens to a mind that has never
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: been asked to account for what it costs. This is
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: the truth that does not bend. You do not have
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: to choose to drift. Drift happens on its own once
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: it is practiced. But you do have to choose to stop.
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: Seneca wrote, It is not that we have a short
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: time to live, but that we waste a great deal
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: of it. Not a small amount, a great deal. And
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: the greatest share of that waste is not in distraction
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: or idleness. It is in the forward displacement of attention,
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: the mind leaving the present for a future that mostly
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: does not arrive the way it was imagined. The Stoics
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: taught that the present moment is the only place where
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: life is actually happening. Every other moment, past or future,
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: is only a thought. And a thought about tomorrow is
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: not life. It is imagination wearing the costume of responsibilities.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: Dread is a form of waste. Every hour spent in
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: tomorrow is an hour taken from today. Say this. Dread
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: is a form of waste. Every hour spent in tomorrow
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: is an hour taken from today. Not borrowed. Taken. Without return.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: Your practice is this. At the end of today, before
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: you sleep, or before the evening fully dissolves, do three things. First,
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: name one moment in the day when you were fully present.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: When your attention was actually where your body was. When
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: something landed and you received it. Second, name one moment
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: when you were not, when you were physically somewhere but
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: mentally elsewhere, when something was offered and you were not
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: there to take it. Third, notice the difference. Notice what
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: you remember clearly from the moment of presence and how
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: thin and blurred the moment of absence is in your memory.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: Let that difference be information. Let that difference teach you
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: what presence actually gives you that forward dread never can.
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: Affirm this. Today is enough. This is who you become.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: When you start counting the real cost of forward drift,
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: Presence stops being an abstract ideal and becomes a daily
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: act of recovery. You do not have to arrive at
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: perfect presence all at once. You only have to start
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: noticing when you have left and what you left behind.
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: Because noticing is the beginning. Naming the cost is the beginning.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: And the person who names it honestly is already, in
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: that moment, choosing something better. Carry this line with you.
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: Time spent in tomorrow is time permanently subtracted from today.
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: What will you give today that you have been sending
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: forward without permission? Lesson 7. Uncertainty is not the enemy
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: you named it. Tranquility does not wait for certainty. It
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: is the posture chosen inside uncertainty. Here is the grip
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: that holds you. You have been waiting. You have been
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: living in a kind of conditional present. A present that
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: is waiting for the future to resolve itself into something
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: knowable before you allow yourself to fully inhabit it. As
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: though the right to peace must be earned by the
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: removal of all unknowns. As though calm is a destination
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: you arrive at when the uncertainty finally clears. But the
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: uncertainty does not clear. It never fully clears. It is
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: not a weather front passing through. It is the permanent
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: condition of being alive. And so the wait never ends.
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: And the calm is never quite claimed. And you keep
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: standing at the edge of your own life, asking for
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: a guarantee that does not exist. Picture a sailor who
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: will not leave harbor. The boat is ready. The supplies
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: are loaded. The destination is known. But the sailor stands
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: at the dock, asking the sea for a promise. asking
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: for confirmation that no storm will arise, no current will shift,
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: no wind will change. The sea does not make promises.
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: It never has. And the sailor who waits for the
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: guarantee waits forever. The harbor becomes its own kind of prison.
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: The boat sits and rusts in its certainty of safety.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: And the sailor, technically safe, technically warm, never goes anywhere
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: at all. You know this sailor. You have been this
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: sailor every time you held something back from your present life,
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: pending a certainty that will not come. What would you
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: do today? Right now, with this actual day, if you
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: accepted fully and without negotiation that tomorrow will always hold
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: something unknown, what have you been withholding from the present,
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: from your relationships, your work, your own sense of purpose,
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: on the condition that the future first becomes something predictable?
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: Consider this common situation. You are holding back from a commitment,
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: a direction, a decision, because you cannot yet see how
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: it ends. Your mind tells you that the responsible thing
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: is to wait, to gather more information, to delay until
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: the picture is complete. But the picture is never complete.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: More information arrives and opens new questions. The waiting becomes
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: its own life, a life organized entirely around the management
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: of uncertainty. rather than the living of presence. Here is
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: the law. Accepting uncertainty is not passivity. It is the
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: release of a fiction, the fiction that you were ever
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: going to get the guarantee your worry was trying to extract.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: Mark this as fact. Control was always limited. The energy
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: you were spending on trying to secure it was always
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: going somewhere that could not hold it. Epictetus said, seek
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: not that the things which happen should happen as you wish,
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: but wish the things which happen to be as they are,
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: and you will have a tranquil flow of life. A
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: tranquil flow, not a tranquil arrival, not calm after the resolution.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: A flow that moves through the uncertainty rather than stopping
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: before it. A way of moving through life that does
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: not require the sea to be still before you leave
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: the dock. The Stoics taught that the person who demands
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: certainty before acting is not being careful. They are being
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: controlled by the very thing they fear. The acceptance of
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: uncertainty is not surrender. It is the first act of
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: actual freedom. Tranquility is not the absence of uncertainty. It
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: is the acceptance that uncertainty is the condition. Do this
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: and nothing else. Name one thing, just one thing, that
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: you have been withholding from today, from the full presence
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: of this day, pending a certainty that will not come.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: One relationship you have held at arm's length. One commitment
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: you have deferred. One part of yourself you have kept
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: in reserve, waiting for some confirmation that the ground is safe.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: Name it. And then give it to today. Give it
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: to this day. Not the day when you are sure.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: Not the day when the fear is gone. But this ordinary, uncertain,
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: fully real day that is actually here. Calm is a
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: choice I make. This is what opens when you choose it.
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: When you stop demanding certainty as the price of presence.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: You find that the energy you were spending on that
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: demand comes back to you. You find that acting inside
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: uncertainty is not reckless. It is honest. You find that
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: the courage to move without a guarantee is not the
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: absence of wisdom. It is wisdom's highest expression. And you
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: find that the tranquility you were waiting to arrive is
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: already available, right now, in the posture of a person
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: who has accepted that the sea will do what the
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: sea does and has chosen to sail anyway. Let this
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: be the one you return to. Tranquility does not wake
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: for certainty. It is the posture chosen inside uncertainty. Stop
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: waiting for still water. You were built for the open sea.
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: Lesson 8. Stop turning possibilities into certainties. The mind that
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: chases certainty manufactures it as catastrophe. Here is the pattern
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: you may not have named yet. You take a possibility,
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: something that could happen, not something that will happen, not
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: something that has happened, just a could, and you treat
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: it with the full emotional weight of a certainty. You
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: respond to it the way you would respond to something
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: already true. You feel the grief before the loss. You
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: feel the shame before the failure. You feel the fear
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: before the threat. And then, because you are responding to
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: it as real, your mind takes that response as evidence
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: that the thing must be real, must be coming, must
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: be as large as it feels. The possibility becomes a fact.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: The fact becomes a disaster. The disaster fills the room.
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: See this clearly. There is a shadow on a wall.
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: It is a shadow cast by a small object. something ordinary,
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: something unimportant. But the frightened eye does not see the
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: small object. The frightened eye fixes on the shadow and
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: begins to enlarge it. It traces the edges further than
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: they go. It gives the shadow a shape that is
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: not there, a depth that does not exist, a meaning
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: that the object behind it never carried. The shadow fills
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: the wall, then the room. And you forget, somewhere in
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: the enlarging, that what you are afraid of is not
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: the room filling darkness but a small thing on a
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: shelf that was never threatening you at all. How many
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: times has the thing you were absolutely certain would destroy
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: you arrived in a form far smaller than the one
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: you constructed? How many times did the conversation you dreaded
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: not go the way you dreaded it? How many times
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: did the outcome you were certain was catastrophic turn out
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: to be manageable, survivable, even ordinary? And if that is true,
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: what is the realistic version of the thing you are
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: most afraid of right now, stripped of every layer your
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: imagination added without permission? Here is what this looks like
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: in an ordinary day. Your mind presents you with a
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: worst-case version of something upcoming, and you engage with it
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: as though it is the probable version, as though the
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: worst is what you should be planning for, as though
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: anything less than catastrophizing is naive. But the worst-case version
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: is not realistic. It is one possibility among many, and
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: almost always the least likely of them. Your mental energy,
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: your worry, your sleeplessness, is not going toward the probable.
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: It is going toward the amplified shadow. Here is the law.
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: Realism sees probability. Catastrophizing sees only the worst outcome at
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: full volume, stripped of every other possibility, treated as the
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: single truth. This is the truth that does not bend.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: Accuracy is not pessimism, and it is not optimism. It
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: is probability honestly assessed, and probability honestly assessed is almost
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: never as dark as anxiety insists. Marcus Aurelius wrote, Do
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: not indulge in hopes which outrun possibility. The same principle
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: cuts both ways. Do not indulge in fears that outrun
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: possibility either. The mind that stays within what is actually possible,
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: not what is guaranteed, not what is certain, but what
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: is proportionate and probable. That mind is not a diminished mind.
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: It is a disciplined one. The Stoics taught that the
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: undisciplined mind enlarges both hope and fear beyond their real dimensions.
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: And the practice of return, the practice of proportion, is
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: the practice of a mind that has learned to see
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: what is actually in front of it. The mind that
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: stops chasing Impossible certainty finally rests in what is real.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: Your practice is this. Take your current biggest fear, the
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: one that has been sitting at the center of your
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: mental orbit. First, write the worst case version, the version
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: your mind has been running. Second, write the realistic version,
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: not the best case, not a denial of the difficulty,
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: but the honest probable version, the one that accounts for
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: your past resilience, for the actual evidence, for the actual likelihood. Third,
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: from this moment forward, spend your energy only on the
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: realistic version, Not the amplified shadow. Not the room filling darkness.
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: The actual object on the shelf. I do not borrow
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: tomorrow's trouble. This is who you become. When you stop
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: inflating possibilities into certainties, the room feels like a room again.
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: The object is small again. Your force is not consumed
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: by something that was never as large as fear made it.
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: You find that clear-eyed assessment is not cold. It is kind.
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: Kind to yourself. Kind to the people around you. Kind
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: to the day in front of you. And you find
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: that the calm you were looking for was not on
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: the other side of certainty. It was on the other
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: side of proportion. Carry this line with you. The mind
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: that stops chasing impossible certainty finally rests in what is real.
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: Stay with the realistic version. Stay with the real thing.
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: The shadow is smaller than you think. And what becomes
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: possible when you stop amplifying every shadow? That question is
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: exactly where we go next. Lesson 9. The future does
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: not need you there right now. The future needs your strength,
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: not your presence, and strength is only built today. Here
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: is the trick the mind plays. It tells you that
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: thinking about tomorrow is the same as preparing for tomorrow.
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: That mental occupancy of the future is a form of work.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: That the time you spend turning over future scenarios in
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: your mind is time productively invested in readiness. It is not.
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: Thinking about the future without acting in the present is
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: not preparation. It is occupation. It is your mind moving
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: into a space before there is anything real to do there,
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: setting up furniture in a room that does not yet exist,
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: and leaving the room you are actually in bare and unattended.
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: Imagine a farmer and a field. The field is here,
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: in front of the farmer, ready to be worked right now,
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: in this season, with this soil and these conditions and
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: this available light. But the farmer does not work the field.
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: The farmer studies next year's weather charts. Every hour of
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: daylight goes into models and forecasts and predictions about what
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: conditions might look like in a year's time. The seed
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: sits in the bag. The soil sits untouched. the season turns.
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: And when next year comes, when the future the farmer
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: was so occupied with finally arrives, there is no strong
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: harvest waiting, because there was no planting. Because the farmer
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: was never in the field, the farmer was always in
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: next year, and next year's problems arrived into a present
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: that had nothing to offer them. What does today actually
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: need from you that you have been sending ahead to tomorrow?
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: What work, what presence, what attention, what care belongs entirely
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: to this day and has been going unpaid, because your
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: mind was already in the next one. And if you
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: gave today your complete force, your full attention, your undivided strength,
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: what would actually be ready when the future finally knocked
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: on the door? Here is what this looks like in
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: an ordinary day. You have something real to do, something
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: that belongs to today, something that your strength could move.
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: But before you start it, your mind has already traveled
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: forward to the problems it might create, the follow-up tasks
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: it will generate, the difficulties it might reveal. And so
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: you start the task already depleted, already living in its
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: consequences before you have experienced its beginning. The task gets
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: the divided version of you. The future gets all of
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: your anxiety, and neither receives the actual strength you had
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: to offer. Here is the law. Thinking about tomorrow while
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: neglecting today does not make tomorrow better. It makes today weaker,
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: and a weak today cannot build a strong tomorrow. This
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: is the truth that does not bend. Staying ahead requires
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: a strong today. Dread produces neither strength nor readiness, not
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: some strength, not partial readiness, neither. Seneca wrote, omit the
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: majority of the future from your thoughts. Do not torment
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: yourself with problems that may never come. Omit the majority.
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: That is a striking instruction. Not all future thought, not
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: the planning that belongs to the present, but the majority.
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: the excess, the mental occupation that goes beyond what today
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: can use. The Stoics taught that the future is not
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: improved by your presence in it before it arrives. It
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: is improved by the quality of the person who meets it,
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: and that person is built only here, only now, only
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: in the choices of this ordinary day. The future does
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: not need your attention now. It needs your strength, which
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: only today can build. Do this and nothing else. Find
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: one task that belongs entirely to today, not to tomorrow's preparation,
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: not to some eventual goal, but to the actual work
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: of this actual day, and finish it before you allow
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: your mind to travel even once into tomorrow. Let that
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: single act of present completion be the proof that today
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: can hold you, that the present is not too small
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: for your force, that what you do here, now, in
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: this hour, is real work building real strength. I return,
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: again and again. This is who you become. When you
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: stop occupying the future before it is asked for you,
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: you become someone who is actually here. Someone whose strength
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: is not dispersed across imagined problems but concentrated in real ones.
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: Someone who, when tomorrow finally arrives, has something genuine to
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: bring to it, because today was not abandoned. You become
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: the person who built the thing, who worked the field,
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: who laid the plank, who showed up for the actual day.
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: And that person The one who is genuinely present in
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: today is the capable future self you were worried about.
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: They are built here. They are built now. Let this
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: be the one you return to. The future needs your strength,
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: not your presence. And strength is only built today. Stay
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: in the field. Work the ground beneath your feet. The
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: future will find you ready, because you did not abandon
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: the present to go looking for it. Lesson 10. Stop
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: burning force against what must be. The energy spent resisting
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: necessary uncertainty is the most expensive waste you carry. Not
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: the worry, not the sleepless nights, not the anxious scanning
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: of every horizon, though all of those cost you something real.
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: The deepest drain is the raw force you pour into
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: fighting what cannot be reversed, what cannot be cancelled, what
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: was always going to require your acceptance whether you gave
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: it gracefully or not. That is where the quiet exhaustion lives.
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: That is where your strength goes before you ever get
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: to use it on anything real. Here is what this
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: looks like in an ordinary day. You know there is
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: something in your life that will not resolve itself on
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: your timeline. A relationship whose outcome is not in your
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: hands alone. A transition at work you did not choose
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: and cannot undo. A health situation. An uncertain outcome. A
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: future that has refused every attempt to make it solid.
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: And every morning you wake up and lean your full
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: weight against it. As if today might be the day
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: your resistance finally wins. It does not win. The thing remains.
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: And you arrive at the evening emptied. Ixorot. A hand
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: pressing flat and hard against an incoming tide. Muscles straining.
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: The body exhausted. The tide utterly indifferent. The tide does
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: not slow. It does not negotiate. It does not even
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: notice the hand. And while the hand is pressed there,
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: desperate and burning, the shore directly behind goes completely undefended. Open. Unattended.
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: The work that was yours to do on that shore.
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: The ground that needed you. The real tasks that were
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: within your reach. All of it sits untouched. That hand
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: is you. That tide is the uncertainty you are fighting.
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: And that undefended shore is today. Ask yourself this honestly.
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: What necessary uncertainty in your life are you still pressing against,
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: still fighting, as though the sheer force of your resistance
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: could cancel it? Not a passing worry, not a solvable problem,
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: but something that is simply real and will remain real
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: regardless of how much of yourself you spend against it.
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: And then ask this. What would you do with that
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: force if you released it from that fight? What would
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: become available to you in this day, in this hour,
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: if you stopped paying that cost? Here is what resistance
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: tells you to believe. And here is where it lies.
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: It says that acceptance means approval. It says that if
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: you stop fighting this thing, you are saying it is acceptable.
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: That it is fine. That you chose it. That is
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: not what acceptance means. Not here. Not in this understanding.
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: Acceptance is not approval. Acceptance is the decision to stop
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: paying indefinitely for what you cannot reverse. You are not
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: saying it is good. You are saying that your force
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: is worth more than the fight you are losing. Here
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: is the truth that does not bend. The energy you
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: free from useless resistance does not disappear into emptiness. It
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: returns to you. It becomes capacity. And capacity, genuine available
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: force directed at what is actually yours to do, that
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: is where calm begins. Not in the absence of difficulty,
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: not in the solving of every uncertain thing, but in
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: the return of your own strength to the ground you
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: can actually work. Musonius Rufus taught that the person who
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: is truly educated is the one who is not pained
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: by anything that is necessary. Sit with that. He is
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: not describing someone who feels nothing. He is describing someone
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: who has learned to stop spending pain on what is fixed,
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: on what cannot be otherwise, on what the world has
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: already decided. The Stoics taught, as one steady voice across centuries,
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: that suffering is doubled not by circumstances, but by the
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: resistance we add to them. The circumstance arrives once. The
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: resistance arrives every morning, by choice, until we choose differently.
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: Your practice is this. First, name one necessary uncertainty in
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: your life. that you are still actively fighting, something real,
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: something that will not change because you oppose it. Second,
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: say it plainly to yourself. Say, this is real, and
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: my fighting it changes nothing. Not as defeat, but as
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: the clearest, most honest thing you have said about it. Third,
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: take the force you just released and redirect it, right now,
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: toward one action that is genuinely yours to take. One
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: thing inside your actual reach, one movement in the ground
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: that belongs to you. Calm is a choice I make,
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: This is what opens when you choose it. When you
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: stop burning yourself against the tide, you become someone whose
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: strength is actually available. Someone who is not perpetually exhausted
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: before the real work begins. Someone who can look at
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: an uncertain future and say, I cannot control the tide,
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: but I can work this shore, and I will. Your
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: character shifts from resistant to capable. Your mind shifts from
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: depleted to present. Your peace stops being a thing you
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: are waiting to earn, and starts being the ground you
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: already stand on. Carry this line with you, accepting what
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: must be uncertain frees the force you were burning in resistance.
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: That is not passivity. That is the most intelligent use
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: of yourself you have ever made. Lesson 11. Every return
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: to today is a restoration. You do not fail when
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: your mind drifts forward. You only fail if you do
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: not bring it back. That is the whole law of
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: this practice, that it changes everything about how you judge
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: yourself in the middle of an ordinary day. The drift
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: is not the problem. The drift is what minds do
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: especially minds that have spent years trained into forward scanning,
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: into what-if loops, into the restless rehearsal of futures not
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: yet arrived. The drift is expected. The return is the act.
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: The return is the whole point. Here is the cost
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: of not understanding this. You believe that every time your
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: mind crosses into tomorrow, you have failed the practice, broken
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: the rule, proved that you cannot do this. So you
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: add that judgment on top of the drift, and now
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: you are carrying two things instead of one. You are
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: carrying the anxiety about tomorrow, and the shame about the anxiety,
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: and the shame is often heavier. You exhaust yourself not
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: only by leaving, but by punishing yourself for having left.
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: And that punishment is its own form of mental absence,
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: its own quiet drain on the strength that today needs.
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: Watch this. Think of a tide. It pulls back from
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: the shore, always, as tides do, as the law of
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: water requires. And then it returns. The shore does not
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: mourn the retreat. The shore does not declare itself ruined
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: by the going out. The shore remains, patient and unchanged,
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: and the tide comes back, and the return is not
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: a correction of a failure. The return is the natural law,
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: the thing the tide is built to do. You were
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: built the same way. Your mind will pull away from
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: the present. That is not broken. The return, quiet, deliberate, unjudged.
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: That is the nature you are training toward, the law
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: you are learning to trust. Ask yourself honestly, How many
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: times today have you noticed your mind in tomorrow, and quietly,
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: without drama, chosen to come back? And if you have
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: done it even once, even imperfectly, what would it mean
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: to count that as a success? What would change in
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: you if you measured this practice not by how many
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: times you drifted, but by how many times you returned?
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: Here is what the drifting mind tells itself, and here
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: is where it has been wrong all along. It says,
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: I have drifted so many times, it must be permanent.
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: It says, this is just how I am wired. This
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: is the shape of my attention, and no amount of
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: returning will retrain it. That is fear speaking, not evidence.
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: The capacity to return is not weakened by how often
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: you have had to use it. It is built by it.
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: Every return is a repetition. Every repetition is training. You
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: are not proving your weakness each time you notice the drift.
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: You are exercising the one muscle that matters most in
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: this entire practice. Here is the law. Epictetus taught, never
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: say about anything that you have lost it, but that
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: you have restored it. He meant your possessions, your people,
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: the things the world can take. But apply it here.
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: When your mind drifts into tomorrow, you have not lost today.
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: You have simply sent it ahead temporarily. And the moment
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: you bring it back, that is not a recovery from failure.
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: That is a restoration. You have returned something to its
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: rightful place. And that act of returning is a success
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: every single time. The Stoics taught that the practice of
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: presence is not a destination you reach and stay in forever.
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: It is a direction you keep choosing again and again
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: in the small moments of an ordinary day. Every time
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: the mind pulls out with the tide and you gently,
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: firmly bring it back to shore. Do this and nothing else.
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: Each time today your mind crosses into tomorrow, name it
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: without drama. simply say to yourself there it goes and
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: return once without punishment without the commentary about how many
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: times this makes it count the returns write them down
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: if you need to not the drifts the returns and
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: at the end of the day let that number whatever
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: it is be the measure of your practice not the
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: size of your failure Affirm this. I return. Again and again.
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: This is who you become. The person who returns to today.
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: Without self-punishment. Without the added weight of judgment. Without making
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: the drift into a verdict. That person is already living
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: from calm. Not arriving at calm. Not waiting to earn it.
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: Already living from it. Because calm is not the absence
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: of the pulling tide. Calm is the practiced willingness to
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: return to the shore. Quietly. Surely. As many times as
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: the day requires. Your character is not defined by whether
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: you drift. It is defined by whether you come back.
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: And every time you come back, you are becoming the
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: person who can be trusted with today. Let this be
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: the one you return to. Every moment reclaimed from dread
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: is a restoration, not a new achievement. The return is
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: not a beginning again from zero. It is proof that
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: you never fully left. You stayed, and that matters. You
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: stayed through the whole of this, through every lesson, every question,
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: every moment the practice felt like too much to hold.
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: And some part of you, maybe the truest part, chose
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: to remain. That choosing was not nothing. That choosing was everything.
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: Because the problem was never that you could not do this.
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: The problem was that no one had told you the
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: truth clearly enough. That presence is not a permanent state
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: you achieve and then keep without effort. It is a
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: practice of return. Ordinary and repeated. Available to you in
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: every ordinary moment of this ordinary day. Worry is not wisdom.
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: Dread is not loyalty to the future. Every hour you
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: live fully in the present. With your force here, your
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: attention here, your weight planted in this actual day. That
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: is the only real preparation there is. Not the rehearsal
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: of disasters. Not the mental occupation of futures that have
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: not arrived. Not the sleepless cataloging of what might go wrong.
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: The mind that returns to today, even imperfectly, even after
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: long wandering, builds the only strength that will matter when
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: tomorrow finally does arrive. And it will arrive on its own.
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: It always does. And when it gets here, it will
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: find you capable. because you did not abandon the present
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: to go looking for it. The calm you have been
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: searching for is not waiting somewhere ahead of you. It
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: is not on the other side of the next certainty,
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: the next solved problem, the next cleared horizon. It is
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: the ground beneath the very moment you are standing in
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: right now. It was always here. You were simply somewhere else.
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: Now write it in the comments, as a seal, as
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: a declaration made not just to yourself, but to this moment. Write,
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: I am fully present in this day. Write it because
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: you mean it because you have earned it, because you
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: have sat through 10 lessons and let them do their
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: work on you, and something has shifted, and that shift
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: deserves to be named. That phrase is your anchor. Let
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: it hold you. If this reached you today, if something
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: in it landed in a place that needed landing, pass
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: it to someone whose mind is always one day ahead
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: of their life. Subscribe, like this episode, share it with
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: that person you are already thinking of. The one who
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: needs to hear that calm is not a reward waiting
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: in the future. They need this now, today. Thank you
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: for trusting this hour to something that matters. The day
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: you stop abandoning is the day that finally starts to
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: hold you. This show is made by OboMedia.