The Space Between

THE SPACE BETWEEN

I found Stoicism in a bookshop on Chicken Street in Kabul, not because I was looking for it, but because the previous evening at 2am I had a panic attack and needed something to bring structure and help me deal with my stressful life.

What I found that day, and in the years since, comes down to two ideas.

The first is the dichotomy of control: almost everything that happens to you sits outside your power to decide. The weather, the market, other people's opinions, the outcome of anything you've already set in motion. What remains entirely yours is a much smaller list, your judgments, your intentions, your choices, what you do next, and most of the exhaustion in an ordinary life comes from spending energy on the first list as though it belonged on the second.

The second is what Epictetus was really pointing at underneath that idea: between whatever happens to you and whatever you do next, there is a space. Most of the time it's barely noticeable, the width of a single breath. But an unreasonable amount of what goes right or wrong in a life gets decided by how that narrow space is used, or left empty and available for the first reaction that arrives.

This book is about finding that space and standing in it on purpose. I've spent twenty years testing it, first in uniform and since in senior leadership, and I've written down what actually held up under real pressure and what didn't.

You won't become unshakeable. Nobody does. You'll just get faster at finding your feet again.