Remember when life’s path is steep to keep your mind even.

Steep ground is where people lose their footing mentally, and lost composure usually does more damage than the difficulty itself. Panic narrows what you see, speeds up decisions that should be slow, and turns a hard stretch into a run of avoidable errors. Staying level does not mean feeling calm, which is not always on offer. It means acting at your ordinary pace while the feelings do what they do.

When things are hard, protect the boring parts of the day: sleep, meals, the walk, the hour you always work. They are not trivial, they are the ballast. Decisions made from a steady routine come out better than those made from the edge.