Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

to speak against his conscience. Here I stand, I can do no other; so
help me God. Amen.”
Is it not interesting that the leaders who end up truly tested by
turbulent times end up sincerely relying on some measure of faith
and belief to get them through difficult times?
That was the story of Lincoln. Like many smart young people, he
was an atheist early in life, but the trials of adulthood, especially the
loss of his son and the horrors of the Civil War, turned him into a
believer. Kennedy spent most of his life looking down on his parents’
Catholicism... but you can bet he was praying as he stood up to the
threat of nuclear annihilation.
Here I stand, I can do no other; so help me God.
Nihilism is a fragile strategy. It’s always the nihilists who seem to
go crazy or kill themselves when life gets hard. (Or, more recently,
are so afraid of dying that they obsess about living forever.)
Why is that? Because the nihilist is forced to wrestle with the
immense complexity and difficulty and potential emptiness of life
(and death) with nothing but their own mind. This is a comically
unfair mismatch.
Again, when nearly all the wise people of history agree, we should
pause and reflect. It’s next to impossible to find an ancient
philosophical school that does not talk about a higher power (or
higher powers). Not because they had “evidence” of its existence, but
because they knew how powerful faith and belief were, how essential
they were to the achievement of stillness and inner peace.
Fundamentalism is different. Epicurus was right—if God exists,
why would they possibly want you to be afraid of them? And why
would they care what clothes you wear or how many times you pay
obeisance to them per day? What interest would they have in
monuments or in fearful pleas for forgiveness? At the purest level,
the only thing that matters to any father or mother—or any creator—
is that their children find peace, find meaning, find purpose. They
certainly did not put us on this planet so we could judge, control, or
kill each other.
But this is not the problem most of us are dealing with. Instead
we struggle with skepticism, with an egotism that puts us at the
center of the universe. That’s why the philosopher Nassim Taleb’s