🌷 Sunday Snippets: August 16th, 2026

Hi all,

This week’s snippets include what to do before declaring disaster, a Stoic reset for complicated minds, and more.

I hope you find these resources useful during the week ahead.

This is Life and Soul to Virtue
Adversity doesn’t have to defeat virtue. It can become the very thing that strengthens it. This reflection brings together Montaigne, Horace, Seneca, and Lucan to show how hardship tests courage, sharpens character, and reveals resilience.

It also offers a Stoic caution: we shouldn’t seek danger needlessly, but, with practice, we can meet unavoidable trials with bravery and resilience.

Before You Declare Disaster
A four-word message can be enough for the mind to come up with an entire disaster. This piece uses Epictetus and Seneca to show how Stoic practice separates fact from fearful interpretation, helping us examine imagined catastrophes before they take control. And when real difficulty does arrive, it offers a second task: meet the facts with courage and choose a response worthy of us.

IN-SHADOW - A Modern Odyssey
While not directly related to Stoicism, this animated short film is nothing if not a philosophical journey. It’ll certainly make you think about its relevance to our times.

From the description:
Embark on a visionary journey through the fragmented unconscious of our modern times, and with courage face the Shadow. Through Shadow into Light.

The Stoic Reset for a Complicated Mind
This episode uses animals as a reminder to return to the present moment.

Hadot and Marcus Aurelius show that life is lived only in the now, where we can think clearly, act justly, and avoid adding needless disturbance to events.

Animals offer a simple model of presence: they don’t argue with the past or rehearse the future, but inhabit what’s directly before them.

Short is the time remaining. Live like a highlander. It makes no difference where a man is, here or there, if wherever he finds himself he treats the world as a single nation state.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 10.15

All the best for the week ahead,
Allan