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Good morning. I’m holding as I speak a battered little book with pages coming apart from the spine. It is dated 1904 and it belonged to my father. It is a selection of the discourses of Epictetus, a 1st century Roman slave who became a philosopher of the Stoic school. Stoicism is being rediscovered at the moment, not surprisingly – it makes sense in uncertain times. The core if it is this – the ancient Stoics distinguished between the things we can control and the things we can’t. As they saw accidents, illnesses and natural disasters are things which simply happen. We can’t do much about them but what we can control is our response to them. Much of our unhappiness comes from our instinctive reactions to adversity. Once we realise that we can’t control what happens we can train ourselves to find inner peace. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, kept a spiritual diary titled: ‘to myself’ in which he reminded himself that he was only small part of a universe which ran according to its own laws and not to his desires. His responsibility was to be as wise, rational and kind as he could be. A representative of Penguin Classics says that sales of his Meditations have increased year on year and the trend has accelerated since the lockdown. Yet Stoicism has often had a bad press; written off as British stiff-upper lip by those who believed in ‘letting it all hang out’. My father was a bit of a Stoic, like many of his generation, and I could see how self-discipline and forbearance hid a sensitivity that I rarely glimpsed. Perhaps in reaction I have to confess that I am not a natural Stoic at all being panic-prone and easily overwhelmed by fear. Yet I know that Stoic philosophy influenced many of the early Christian monks, helping them to cultivate a gentle detachment and compassion which I admire and would like to emulate. Controlling the panic response, the anger response, the greed response was for them the beginnings of Christian prayer and led to contemplation, a Christian version of Stoic serenity. Bad Stoic as I am, I am also finding at the moment that there is really no alternative to this ancient wisdom. There are moments of meltdown, sure, and sometimes we need to have a cry, especially when we are struck by the sudden vertigo of realising that our futures have a question mark hanging over them that we never anticipated. Resilience begins in simple bodily disciplines. Paying attention to the breath, stillness, inhabiting the present moment, gratitude, recognising that we are a part of something bigger. It may not sound much, but it is all that we have and may be all we need.