How does anyone find time to think? To do meaningful work? To detach and relax? We’re completely overstimulated, overscheduled, and overwhelmed.

The news with its narrative of crisis after crisis finds us on whichever device we happen to be staring at. Today, we can add to that car horns, cell phone alarms and notifications, stereos or headphones, jackhammers, espresso machines, airplanes. In Seneca’s time, to reach stillness meant contending with the cacophony of disturbances that filled the streets of Rome: carriages rumbling through the stone streets, carpenters at work, vendors shouting their offerings, children at play, dogs barking. “And when basically all the wisdom of the ancient world agrees on something,” Holiday writes, “only a fool would decline to listen.” 3 Key Takeaway Lessons from Stillness is the Key : Holiday looks at Buddhism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Christianity, Hinduism, and countless other philosophical schools and religions and shows that it’s all but impossible to find one that doesn’t venerate this inner peace-this stillness -as the highest good and as the key to a thriving, meaningful life. In Stillness is the Key, the book that completes the trilogy that began with The Obstacle is The Way and Ego is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday argues that stillness is the key to being better at anything you do. “You may be sure that you are at peace with yourself,” Seneca wrote, “when no noise reaches you, when no word shakes you out of yourself, whether it be flattery or a threat, or merely an empty sound buzzing about you with unmeaning din.” They could still think well, work well, and be well. To the ancient Stoics, if one could develop this stillness, this peace within themselves-if they could achieve apatheia, as they called it-the world could be at war and in complete chaos, but they could maintain their tranquility. It’s one of the most powerful forces on earth. It’s what makes room for gratitude and happiness.

It’s that ability to step back and reflect.

Stillness is that quiet moment when inspiration hits you. To possess quietude-exterior and interior-on command. To be steady while the world spins around you. The second book of the Bhagavad Gita, the epic poem of the warrior Arjuna, speaks of samatvam, an “evenness of mind-a peace that is ever the same.” The Greeks, euthymia and hesychia. “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Ego is the enemy genre