Life is unpredictable. There are many unexpected problems that will pop up, and I’ve found that two things help me sail choppy water during the day. Both are done in the morning: A) read a few pages of Stoicism, like Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and B) control at least a few things you can control. First, for A, here is one Marcus Aurelius quote on my refrigerator that often does the trick: “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.” Now, B) control what you can control. No matter how shitty your day is, no matter how catastrophic it might become, you can make your bed. And that gives you the feeling, at least it gives me the feeling, even in a disastrous day, that I’ve held on to the cliff ledge by a fingernail and I haven’t fallen.