Ryan Holiday on gratitude, stillness, and what the pandemic forced him to see

Executive overview

Most driven people treat busyness as identity — travel, events, meetings — and never question whether any of it is necessary. The pandemic stripped all of it away. What remained was more valuable.

Ryan Holiday reflects on the five-year anniversary of COVID lockdowns and the unexpected gratitude he feels for what that period taught him about presence, place, and priorities.

The real gift of forced stillness is discovering what you didn't know you were missing.

What the pandemic stripped away — and revealed

• Ryan and his family settled into their ranch in Bastrop County for hundreds of consecutive days
• For the first time in five years, they stayed long enough to watch spring actually happen — buds to leaves to a full forest
• He calculated thousands of miles walked on dirt roads; never missed a bedtime or bath time
• As a writer, he was physically home before but mentally elsewhere — the pandemic closed that gap
• He had assumed he couldn't survive professionally without travel and events; he was wrong
• He found he did better work without them

The book that triggered this reflection

• A staff member at his bookstore recommended Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton
• Dalton, a political advisor, finds herself during lockdown in the English countryside nursing a wild baby hare back to health
• The hare becomes a free-range companion; Dalton spends hundreds of quiet hours learning its habits and perspective
• She describes gaining "a new spirit of attentiveness to nature" — previously she'd observed it only in broad brushstrokes
• She hadn't noticed buds unfurling, bird migrations, or the light through her own window
• Her decision not to leave when restrictions lifted gave her things she would otherwise have permanently missed

Churchill's lesson on perception

• While writing Stillness is the Key, Ryan studied Churchill's relationship with painting, discovered during a nervous breakdown after WWI
• Churchill wrote in Painting as a Pastime that painting forced him to slow down and see what he had previously blown past
• Setting up an easel, mixing paints, waiting for them to dry — the process imposed presence
• Ryan had finished a busy tour for Stillness just before the pandemic — he thought he understood stillness; he didn't

Choosing to stay slow even after restrictions lifted

• Due to health concerns in his household, Ryan extended their slower pace longer than most people did
• He declined most speaking, travel, and social obligations even when they resumed
• He let employees continue working remotely
• He describes this as costly but one of the best decisions he's made
• He grew as an equal parent, read and wrote more, and deepened his connection to where he lives

What the pandemic taught him to be grateful for

• Approximately 500 consecutive bedtimes with his sons
• Projects built together as a family, including the bookstore
• Evidence that many things he believed he had to do, he didn't
• A clearer view of what he had been taking for granted — health, family, the present moment
• The Stoic framework he'd been teaching took on new meaning; he noticed Meditations is a plague book
• He held Stockdale's idea — making his captivity the defining event of his life, which he would not trade in retrospect
• His question to himself in early 2020: "Will this make you a better person or a worse one?"