Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

The Christian word for this term is agape. It is the ecstasy of love
from a higher power, the sheer luck and good fortune of being made
in that image. If you’ve ever seen the Bernini statue of Saint Teresa,
you can get a sense of this feeling in the physical form. The caring
smile of an angel thrusting an arrow into Teresa’s heart. The rays of
golden sun shooting down from heaven. Teresa’s closed eyes and
partly opened mouth, realizing, knowing the depth of love and
connection that exists for her.
Whether it comes from the perspective of space, a religious
epiphany, or the silence of meditation, the understanding that we are
all connected—that we are all one—is a transformative experience.
Such quiet peace follows this... such stillness.
With it, we lose the selfishness and self-absorption at the root of
much of the disturbance in our lives.
The Greeks spoke of sympatheia, the kind of mutual
interdependence and relatedness of all things, past, present, and
future. They believed that each person on this planet had an
important role to play, and should be respected for it. John Cage
came to understand something similar as he embraced his own
quirky, unique style of music—like that four-minute-and-thirty-
three-second song of silence—rather than trying to be like everyone
else. “That one sees that the human race as one person,” he wrote,
with each of us as an individual part of one single body, “enables him
to see that originality is necessary, for there is no need for eye to do
what hand does so well.”
The truly philosophical view is that not only is originality
necessary, but everyone is necessary. Even the people you don’t like.
Even the ones who really piss you off. Even the people wasting their
lives, cheating, or breaking the rules are part of the larger equation.
We can appreciate—or at least sympathize with—them, rather than
try to fight or change them.
Robert Greene, known for his amoral study of power and
seduction, actually writes in his book The Laws of Human Nature
about the need to practice mitfreude, the active wishing of goodwill
to other people, instead of schadenfreude, the active wishing of ill
will. We can make an active effort to practice forgiveness, especially
to those who might have caused those inner-child wounds we have