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As the world around us frays at the seams – ecologically, politically, even spiritually – it can feel almost impossible to remain upright, let alone hopeful. But a few months ago, in a quiet morning Zoom exchange – one of us (Stephen) indoors after tending his chickens, the other (me) chilling in her kitchen – this long-time teacher of Buddhist practice and the author of the recently re-released How to Thrive in Hard Times: A Buddhist Manual, offered to explore what it means to keep going, softly and steadily, when everything seems to be falling apart.
Stephen, now 78, has been practising meditation since his days in India in the 1970s. But his book, he explains, isn’t about becoming a Buddhist. “It’s not a how-to guide,” he says. “It’s a manual for life.” The title nods to Buddhism, but what Stephen’s really offering is something much more radical: the idea that a regular and quiet inner practice can become a form of resistance – a kind of spiritual ‘candle’ or signal held aloft in the dark.
One of Stephen’s most resonant offerings is also one of the simplest.
“When we get up in the morning, we deserve a little bit of space,” he says. So, rather than diving straight into the rush of the media news agenda and noise, he suggests we sit quietly with our morning tea or coffee and “come back home” to ourselves. It’s not about meditation per se, he explains, but about remembering we belong – to our body, to our breath, to our being.
And from this inner place, he suggests adding just one more thread: trust. Not blind optimism, but a felt sense that we really can meet the world as it is, without needing it to improve first, and that we already have everything we need to do that.
As we chat, I mention that just the morning before, we’d had a long power cut, and how the absence of the usual electrical hum had revealed an unexpected quiet. “It was beautiful,” I told him. “You were ready for it,” he said.
This ‘readiness’, he believes, is cultivated not through withdrawal, but through practice – and not practice as spiritual-bypassing or escape. “Meditation isn’t about shutting down. It’s political,” he says. “It helps you see where things went wrong, where you’re attached to extremes. And it keeps you from burning out.”
Stephen has seen burnout up close. His decades of work in the Israel–Palestine conflict taught him that real change rarely comes in thunderclaps. Instead, it comes in moments of quiet bravery: offering kindness in tense conversations, asking someone if they’re open to hearing a different view, giving people the safety to soften.
He goes on to describe how the Buddha, just days before his death, urged his disciples to “be an island to yourselves in the stormy seas”. For Stephen, this inner island isn’t a place of retreat but of a steady commitment to re-entry into a new day and the whole of life.
And, he says, this capacity for steadying doesn’t just help us navigate ideological rifts. It’s also essential in the face of one of our era’s great plagues: loneliness. Stephen sees social disconnection not as a modern failing, but as a story waiting to be rewritten.
“Painful emotions like loneliness or grief aren’t the problem,” he says. “It’s the story we build around them: this will always be my life, I can’t change, I’m exhausted.” Instead, he invites us to feel the full emotion (which will pass) without buying into the story, and to recognise that, spiritually, we are never alone.
“The trees, the sky, the dogs in the street – we belong to life. Whether we like it or not.”
We move on to the topic of how isolated so many young people feel today, with higher levels of mental health issues reported among so-called Generation Z than any generation before them – the generation for whom a connecting phone call feels archaic, and whose social lives are filtered through screens.
Stephen responds not with judgement, but with tenderness, offering examples from his own grandchildren, each of whom, he says, eventually found their way back to presence: one through martial arts, another through working with their hands, and all of them through discovering a trust in life deeper than any algorithm. “Life knows what it needs,” one granddaughter told him. “It’s more intelligent than we are.”
This trust in life, Stephen explains, is the wellspring of a different kind of hope. Not the fragile, conditional hope that depends on outcomes, but an embodied hope rooted in celebration. “I’m not terribly optimistic,” he admits. “The things I was writing about 20 years ago are still happening in my part of the world today. But perhaps we can still feel a deep inner positivity. We can celebrate life, and that celebration itself becomes contagious.”
As we start to close our conversation, he circles back to the role of humility in resilience. In peace work, he says, “all I can do – all I could ever do – was offer a candle in a dark room”.
He recalls a Palestinian boy who, after sitting in one of his interfaith circles, said he finally saw Israelis as human beings, not just soldiers. “I didn’t make peace in the Middle East,” he says. “But I gave what I could.”
In that quiet giving, there is strength.
Stephen speaks of tending his chickens, listening to the trees, returning to the land – not as nostalgic acts, but as restorative ones. “If we’re in touch with life, we’ll protect it,” he says. “Not because of a concept, but because of intimacy.”
By the end of the interview, what remains is not a prescription, but a presence. A reminder that thriving in hard times does not ask for heroism – just a willingness to keep the candle lit. To meet the world, not fix it. To listen, more than talk. And to come home, again and again, to the steadiness that waits beneath the noise.
