In light of everything that’s going on in this world, I wanted to revisit one of the most important (to me) chapters in Stillness Is the Key.

To see people who will notice a need in the world and do something about it… Those are my heroes. — Fred Rogers

In Camus’s final novel, The Fall, his narrator, Clamence, is walking alone on a street in Amsterdam when he hears what sounds like a woman falling into the water. He’s not totally certain that’s what he heard, but mostly, riding the high of a nice evening with his mistress, he does not want to be bothered, and so he continues on.

A respected lawyer with a reputation as a person of great virtue in his community, Clamence returns to his normal life the following day and attempts to forget the sound he heard. He continues to represent clients and entertain his friends with persuasive political arguments, as he always had.

Yet he begins to feel off.

One day, after a triumphant appearance in court arguing for a blind client, Clamence gets the feeling he is being mocked and laughed at by a group of strangers he can’t quite locate. Later, approaching a stalled motorist in an intersection, he is unexpectedly insulted and then assaulted. These encounters are unrelated, but they contribute to a weakening of the illusions he had long held about himself.

It is not with an epiphany or from a blow to the head that the monstrous truth of what he’d done becomes clear. It is a slow, creeping realization that comes to Clamence that suddenly and irrevocably changes his self-perception: That night on the canal he had shrugged off a chance to save someone from committing suicide.

This realization is Clamence’s undoing and the central focus of the book. Forced to see the hollowness of his pretensions and the shame of his failings, he unravels. He had believed he was a good man. But when the moment (indeed moments) called for goodness, he slunk off into the night.

It’s a thought that haunts him incessantly. As he walks the streets at night, the cry of that woman—the one he ignored so many years ago—never ceases to torment him. It toys with him too, because his only hope at redemption is that he might hear it again in real life and then seize the opportunity to dive in and save someone from the bottom of the canal.

It’s too late. He has failed. He will never be at peace again.

The story is fictional, of course, but a deeply incisive one, written not coincidentally in the aftermath of the incredible moral failings of Europe in the Second World War. Camus’s message to the reader pierces us like the scream of the woman in Clamence’s memory: High-minded talk is one thing, but all that matters is what you do. That the health of our spiritual ideals depends on what we do with our bodies in moments of truth.

It is worth comparing the agony and torture of Clamence with another more recent example from another French philosopher, Anne Dufourmantelle, aged fifty-three, who died in 2017 rushing into the surf to save two drowning children who were not her own. In her writing, Anne had spoken often of risk—saying that it was impossible to live life without risk and that in fact, life is risk. It is in the presence of danger, she once said in an interview, that we are gifted with the “strong incentive for action, dedication, and surpassing oneself.”

And when, on the beach in Saint-Tropez, she was faced with a moment of danger and risk, an opportunity to turn away or to do good, she committed the full measure of devotion to her ideals.

What is better? To live as a coward or to die a hero? To fall woefully short of what you know to be right or to fall in the line of duty? And which is more natural? To refuse a call from your fellow humans or to dive in bravely and help them when they need you?

Stillness is not an excuse to withdraw from the affairs of the world. Quite the opposite—it’s a tool to let you do more good for more people.

Neither the Buddhists nor the Stoics believe in what has come to be called “original sin”—that we are a fallen and broken species. On the contrary, they believe we were born good. To them, the phrase “Be natural” was the same as “Do the right thing.” For Aristotle, virtue wasn’t just something contained in the soul—it was how we lived. It was what we did. He called it eudaimonia: human flourishing.

A person who makes selfish choices or acts contrary to their conscience will never be at peace. A person who sits back while others suffer or struggle will never feel good, or feel like they are enough, no matter how much they accomplish or how impressive their reputation may be.

A person who does good regularly will feel good. A person who contributes to their community will feel like they are a part of one. A person who puts their body to good use—volunteering, protecting, serving, standing up for—will not need to treat it like an amusement park to get some thrills.

Virtue is not an abstract notion. We are not clearing our minds and separating the essential from the inessential for the purposes of a parlor trick. Nor are we improving ourselves so that we can get richer or more powerful.

We are doing it to live better and be better.

Every person we meet and every situation we find ourselves in is an opportunity to prove that.

It’s the old Boy Scout motto: “Do a Good Turn Daily.”

Some good turns are big, like saving a life or protecting the environment. But good turns can also be small, Scouts are taught, like a thoughtful gesture, mowing a neighbor’s lawn, calling 911 when you see something amiss, holding open a door, making friends with a new kid at school. It’s the brave who do these things. It’s the people who do these things who make the world worth living in.

Marcus Aurelius spoke of moving from one unselfish action to another—”only there,” he said, can we find “delight and stillness.” In the Bible, Matthew 5:6 says that those who do right will be made full by God. Too many believers seem to think that belief is enough. How many people who claim to be of this religion or that one, if caught and investigated, would be found guilty of living the tenets of love and charity and selflessness?

Take action.

Pick up the phone and make the call to tell someone what they mean to you. Share your wealth. Run for office. Pick up the trash you see on the ground. Step in when someone is being bullied. Step in even if you’re scared, even if you might get hurt. Tell the truth. Maintain your vows, keep your word. Stretch out a hand to someone who has fallen.

Do the hard good deeds. “You must do the thing you cannot do,” Eleanor Roosevelt said.

It will be scary. It won’t always be easy, but know that what is on the other side of goodness is true stillness.

Think of Dorothy Day, and indeed, many other less famous Catholic nuns, who worked themselves to the bone helping other people. While they may have lacked for physician possessions and wealth, they found great comfort in seeing the shelters they had provided, and the self-respect they’d restored for people whom society had cast aside. Let us compare that to the anxiety of the helicopter parents who think of nothing but which preschool in which to enroll their toddler, or the embezzling business partner who is just one audit away from getting caught. Compare that to the nagging insecurity that we feel knowing that we are not living the way we should, or that we are not doing enough for other people.

When the Stoics talk about doing the right thing, know that they are not just advocating for common good. They are thinking of you, too. We should do the right thing not just because it’s right but because if we don’t, it will be impossible for us to respect ourselves. The hardest person to be is the coward or the cheat, for though they get out of doing difficult things, they feel the most shame in the quiet moments when they are alone.

If you see fraud, and do not say fraud, the philosopher Nassim Taleb has said, you are a fraud. Worse, you will feel like a fraud. And you will never feel proud or happy or confident.

Will we fall short of our own standards? Yes. When this happens, we don’t need to whip ourselves like Clamence did, we must simply let it instruct and teach us, like all injuries do.

That’s why twelve-step groups ask their members to be of service as part of their recovery. Not because good deeds can undo the past, but because it helps us get out of our heads, and in the process, helps us write the script for a better future.

If we want to be good and feel good, we have to do good.

There is no escaping this.

Dive in when you hear the cry for help. Reach out when you see the need. Do kindness where you can.

Because you’ll have to find a way to live with yourself if you don’t.

In life, you should always act with the Four Stoic Virtues in mind: courage, wisdom, temperance, and justice. A great way to keep these virtues in mind is Daily Stoic’s Four Virtues medallion. Keep it in your pocket or by your side always, to remind yourself of the importance of these virtues and the need to exemplify them every day.

Then, as now, there was a lot of noise.

There were people who had their own agendas. People who wanted to compromise. People who wanted to explain it away. People who thought there were bigger problems. 

One of the most powerful scenes in the history of cinema captures all of this coming to a head. Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln is surrounded by grousing and squabbling cabinet members as he pushes for passage of the 13th Amendment. He slams his open hand down on the table. It buys a second of silence. 

“Now, now, now,” he says. “We are stepped out on the world’s stage, the fate of human dignity is in our hands… See what is before you. See the here and now, that’s the hardest thing, the only thing that accounts.”

I think of this scene often, but especially lately. Because there are many people who seem to be unable to do that. Who seem to think the situation we are in follows along the same partisan lines as the rest of the ongoing culture war. There seem to be many people who think there is something to argue about here, that it can be explained away, that this is just an extension of that discussion we’ve been having as a society for some time now about “privilege.”

No. 

The fact that my publisher sends me early copies of books before they are released, that’s a privilege. Something I didn’t earn, something that can disappear, something that I enjoy but am not entitled to. 

Not being gunned down in the street by hillbilly vigilantes? Not having the life slowly squeezed out of me on suspicion of some minor crime? 

That’s not a privilege. 

That’s a constitutional right. Actually, it’s more than a constitutional right. According to the Founding Fathers and many philosophers before and since, the rights to life and liberty and property are beyond constitutional: They are inalienable.

The right not to be murdered, to not be harassed by people with guns, to not be targeted, exploited or incarcerated unfairly, to speak your mind, to pursue your religion, for your home to be a safe haven, these are not things that governments give to their people. These are things that God—or generations of evolution and progress—have endowed us with at birth, and we in turn give governments the powers to protect.

All of us.

What you are seeing in the video where a police officer kneels on the neck of a black man crying for air and his mother, what is happening in a video where a black man is strangled to death over selling cigarettes on the street, what has been occurring in my county where Latinos are targeted with ticky-tack traffic violations so they can be detained and then deported, is a betrayal of that compact. It’s a heinous violation of the rights of human beings.

Right here. Within your borders. Filmed for you to watch on your television or phone. 

It is essential that you see it this way. Because when you do, you realize that this affects you, it affects everyone. Directly. Urgently. 

Black. White. Rich. Poor. Young. Old. Republican. Democrat. Socialist. Idiot. If that’s threatened for one person, for one community, it’s threatened for all people. 

I’ll say it again: Not being extrajudicially murdered is not a privilege, it’s not an “exception,” it’s more than a tragedy. To try to categorize it as those things is to woefully fail to describe the injustice that is being done in modern America (and elsewhere). Callous indifference to suffering by the authorities towards minorities or the poor or the voiceless is not just a lamentable fact of modern life, it’s an active crime. 

In real life, Lincoln said that if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. If kneeling on an unarmed, compliant man’s neck for nine minutes is not wrong, nothing is wrong. If chasing down someone you think was maybe breaking into a house (not your house, even) and then blowing them apart with a shotgun in broad daylight is not wrong, nothing is wrong. If putting children in cages is not wrong, nothing is wrong. Even if those were the only examples ever, that would be important. That in and of itself would suffice as a major issue that would need to be addressed, before it got worse.

But of course, they are not the only examples. 

The moral imperative to do something about it is ancient. Marcus Aurelius wrote two thousand years ago that “you can also commit an injustice by doing nothing.” The Stoics believed that harm to one was to harm all. Martin Luther King explained this idea of sympatheia beautifully. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he said. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

I understand that this might not be what you want to hear from me. I write about self-improvement. I write about philosophy. I write about history. That’s true. 

But what do you think the point of the study of those three things are? It’s not so you can make a little more money. It’s not so you can live in your own bubble or have interesting dinner conversations. It’s so you can be better. So you can do the right thing when it counts. 

You have to realize that if the state can find ways to deprive someone of their rights, then they can find ways to deprive you of yours. In fact, this is an inexorable law of power, whether it’s held by segregationists or Stalin, bureaucrats following orders or malevolent dictators. When you give power an inch, it takes another. When you allow evil to happen because you are not its victim, it will inevitably find its way to you—or if not you, to someone you love, or to your great-great-grandchildren. 

That’s what Martin Niemöller’s famous poem “First they came…” is about. You know it: 

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Niemöller’s words were not theoretical. He tolerated, even complied with, policies he didn’t agree with. He rationalized them assuming his Christian church would be protected. For a while, it was. But in the end, Niemöller found himself in Dachau, where he nearly died. Someone later asked how he could have been so self-absorbed, so silent when it mattered. “I am paying for that mistake now,” he said, “and not me alone, but thousands of other persons like me.”

Well, here we are, stepped out on the world’s stage again. Can you see that? Can you see that everyone is watching? Can you grasp the here-and-now? Can you feel what is in your hands? 

It’s the hardest thing, but it’s the only thing that counts. 

Everything else is noise. Everything else is wrong. 

Now. Now. Now. 

To say that Marcus Aurelius had a stressful life would be a preposterous understatement. 

He ran the largest empire in the world. He had a troublesome son. He had a nagging and painful stomach issue. There was a palace coup led by one of his closest friends. Rumors that his wife was unfaithful. The Parthians invaded the Roman client-state of Armenia, triggering a war that would last five years.. The Antonine Plague struck in 165 CE and killed, by conservative estimates, more than 10 million. The River Tiber had one of the worst floods in history, destroying homes and livestock and leaving Rome in famine.  

Should we be surprised that he talks openly in Meditations about his anxiety? About losing his temper? That he sometimes felt ground down and exhausted by life?

Of course he did. 

He had all our problems and more. 

He was besieged by stress. 

And yet that’s exactly why he inspires us. Because he conquered that stress, just like we can. 

“Today I escaped anxiety,” he writes. “Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.”

How did he do that? What can he show us about slaying that demon of stress that we all suffer from?

A lot. 

For starters, the fact that we even know about his anxiety is because of one of those strategies. It was in the pages of his journal that Marcus worked through his problems. Instead of letting racing thoughts dominate his mind and drive him crazy, he put them down on paper. It was also in these pages that Marcus prepared himself for difficulties in advance. He reminded himself that the people he was going to meet during the day would be troublesome, he reminded himself that things were not going to go perfectly, he reminded himself that getting angry never made things better. 

By taking the time to journal and write, he was chipping away at his anxiety, just as we all can–in the morning, at night, on our lunch break. Whenever. 

To calm his anxiety, Marcus was also constantly trying to get perspective. Sometimes he zoomed way out. He meditated on his insignificance. “The infinity of past and future gapes before us,” he wrote, “a chasm whose depths we cannot see. So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress.”Other times, he zoomed way in, telling himself to take things step by step, moment by moment. No one can stop you from that, he said. Concentrate like a Roman, he said, on what’s in front of you like it’s the last thing you’re doing in your life. 

Don’t worry about what’s happened in the past or what might happen in the future. 

This idea of being present is key to overcoming our stress.

We are often anxious because of what we fear will happen next, or after what happens next. We worry about worst case scenarios. We dread potential obstacles. But Marcus, from Epictetus, knew that “Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.”

That’s why Marcus Aurelius spent some much time trying to be present, reminding himself to return to the present moment where nothing is “novel or hard to deal with, but familiar and easily handled.”. 

Like all busy people, Marcus Aurelius had a million things going on. But he also knew that much of what people expected of him or even that he found himself focusing on was not important or necessary. So to reduce stress, he tried hard to separate the essential from the inessential. 

“If you seek tranquility, do less.” But then he makes a critical clarification, “Or (more accurately) do what’s essential… Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time.” 

Was there stuff he had to do that he didn’t want to do? Problems he was stuck with that he’d rather not be stuck with? You bet. That’s life. 

Which is why he, and all of us, have to practice acceptance. 

That’s all we need, he said, willing acceptance at every moment. You can scream “until you turn blue” and curse the world “as if the world would notice!” Or you can “accept the obstacle and work with what you’re given.”

Finally, Marcus Aurelius worked hard to be a good friend to himself. Although he was firm and strong and self-disciplined, he did not whip himself. He knew that it was inevitable that he would mess up. We all do. 

The key, he said, is to just focus on getting back on track. Don’t dwell. Don’t call yourself an idiot. Don’t smack your forehead in anger. 

No, “get back up when you fail,” he said, “celebrate behaving like a human.” “When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances,” he said, “revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep on going back to it.”

It would be wonderful if we didn’t have to do any of this. 

If life was easy. If things always went right. 

That’s just not possible though. 

Stress is an inevitable part of life. It is the friction of the plates of our responsibility rubbing against each other. 

But if stress is inevitable, anxiety and anger and worry are not. Marcus believed that these things were a choice. That we could work past them, through them, that we could discard them, as he said, because they are within us, or at least up to us. 

We can slay our stress because it’s not an external enemy. 

It is an inner battle.