Stillness is the Key

Ryan Holiday, an expert on Stoic philosophy and wisdom, offers a clear path to personal mastery in this insightful and readable book through developing peace within ourselves, called stillness. In Stillness is the Key, an early reference to Seneca captures its essence, "...if a person could develop peace within themselves - if they could achieve apatheia, as they called it - then the whole world could be at war, and they could still think well, work well and be well."

He references every major wisdom tradition and comes up to the same place; for Buddists the word is upekkha, Muslims speak of aslama, in the Bhagavad Gita, the warrior Arjuna speaks of samatvam, "...the evenness of mind-a peace that is never the same." The Greeks called it euthymia and hesychia.  The Epicurians called it ataraxia. To Christians, it is aequanimitas.  In English, it is stillness.

To be steady when the world spins around you is key to maximizing your effectiveness and life.  To achieve this requires mastery in the domains of the mind, the body and the spirit.  And Holiday provides examples, tools and practices to assist us in each of those domains.  This has been a great inspiration to me and I highly recommend Stillness is the Key.