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While I was in the hospital after the car accident, I decided to try a small craft project: hooking a mat. I had never been interested in crafts, and under ordinary circumstances I would never have attempted anything like it, but in the hospital I was looking for something I could do. It was far more difficult than I expected. Getting a single piece of yarn through the backing should have taken seconds, but instead, it demanded enormous concentration and patience. I would wor

Writing and publishing a book has reminded me of something Stoicism has been teaching me for years: effort and outcome are not the same thing. I can write the best book I know how to write. I can revise it, improve it, publish it, talk about it, make videos, write blogs, and keep looking for better ways to reach readers. What I cannot do is make someone buy it. That sounds obvious. Living with it is different. I did not write My Stoic Path to Healing simply to say that I had

By the time I discovered Stoicism, the accident was a couple of years behind me. I had returned home, gone to university, and was teaching. From the outside, that might have looked like recovery. But my body had begun to seriously break down. That period was the most difficult of my life. I had worked hard to rebuild, to move forward, to create a life again. Then suddenly effort did not seem to be enough. I could push harder, but pushing harder did not necessarily make things

After my accident, I could see the words on a page, but I could not read in any meaningful sense. I could make my way through a page and reach the bottom without remembering what I had just read. So I would go back and read it again and again, sometimes many times. For someone who was a teacher and an avid reader, this was deeply frustrating. Reading had always been a central part of my life, and now I could see the words without being able to hold on to them. What I did not

There are situations in life we simply do no t want to accept. Something has happened that we did not choose. Someone has behaved in a way we did not expect. Our circumstances have changed. A plan we counted on has fallen apart. The natural response is often resistance: This shouldn’t have happened. This isn’t fair. Things weren’t supposed to turn out this way. Sometimes every one of those statements is true. But the reality remains. That is where acceptance becomes important

There is a moment between what happens to us and what we do next. Sometimes it lasts only a few seconds. Someone says something that angers us. A plan falls apart. We receive bad news. We feel dismissed, frightened, insulted or disappointed. The first reaction arrives almost instantly. The Stoics understood that. Seneca wrote extensively about anger, and one of his most useful observations was that the first emotional response is not entirely within our control. We feel the j