Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

To the Epicureans real pleasure was about freedom from pain
and agitation. If wanting something makes you miserable while you
don’t have it, doesn’t that diminish the true value of the reward? If
getting what you “want” has its consequences too, is that really
pleasurable? If the same drive that helps you achieve initially also
leads you inevitably to overreach or overdo, is it really an advantage?
Those seeking stillness need not become full-fledged ascetics or
puritans. But we can take the time to realize how much pull and
power desire can have on us, and beyond the momentary pleasure
this might provide us, it deprives us of the deeper peace that we seek.
Think about the times when you feel best. It’s not when you are
pining away. It’s not when you get what you pined for either. There is
always a tinge of disappointment or loss at the moment of
acquisition.
Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita calls desire the “ever-present
enemy of the wise... which like a fire cannot find satisfaction.” The
Buddhists personified this demon in the figure of Mara. They said it
was Mara who tried to tempt and distract Buddha from the path of
enlightenment, from stillness. When Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his
notebook about how to portray envy, he said that she should be
shown as lean and haggard due to her state of perpetual torment.
“Make her heart gnawed by a swelling serpent,” he said, “make her
ride upon death because Envy never dies.” It’d be hard to find a
better depiction of lust either, which Leonardo said puts us “on the
level of beasts.”
None of us are perfect. We have biologies and pathologies that
will inevitably trip us up. What we need then is a philosophy and a
strong moral code—that sense of virtue—to help us resist what we
can, and to give us the strength to pick ourselves back up when we
fail and try to do and be better.
We can also rely on tools to help us resist harmful desires. Saint
Athanasius of Alexandria wrote in his Vita Antonii that one of the
benefits of journaling—Confessions, as the Christians called the
genre—was that it helped stop him from sinning. By observing and
then writing about his own behavior, he was able to hold himself
accountable and make himself better: