It’s amazing when a person is so tired around bedtime that the brain can start cycling up and encouraging all sorts of imagined roadmaps that thwart sleep. I’ve taken to reading at night, or at least before bed. Usually a couple pages of this or that just after everyone else has entered into slumber. 

Last night I revisited Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph (Portfolio/Penguin, 2014). Holiday touched a global current with his popularization of stoicism through a modern lens. So many titles. He has done well.

I can’t say whether he bumpers his modern versions of stoicism with original ancient texts. Sometimes I text snippets of his thoughts to colleagues who hold PhDs in the ancient Mediterranean world to get their thoughts on it. But the greater purpose he has is to bring readers into mental calm in this ever increasing industrialized planet: everything it would appear tugging at our attention spans (we live in an attention economy), the digital screens being the biggest culprit. 

This passage resonated a bit. At least last night. So passing along in the case that it helps others:

“It doesn’t matter if this is the worst time to be alive or the best, whether you’re in a good job market or a bad one, or that the obstacle you face is intimidating or burdensome. What matters is that right now is right now. The implications of your obstacle are theoretical — they exist in the past and the future. We live in the moment. And the more we embrace that, the easier the obstacle will be to face and move.” p. 47.