The aftermath of a messy divorce, the highs and lows inherent in the financial-planning business, the no-end-in-sight paperwork that comes along with becoming a head Legion baseball coach. Not to mention an ongoing battle with anxiety and depression.

At the start of last summer, my brother was dealing with a lot.

As far as I could tell, however, he was handling his lot pretty well.

But hey, he’s my brother, so I was looking for a way to make pretty well even better. So I lent him The Obstacle Is the Way, a simple book of Stoic philosophy I’ve read more than once and has become one of my favorites.

During our next few Sunday get-togethers, he thanked me for doing so. He’d tell me about a rather difficult day and how reading a bit of the book that night helped keep his mind right.

About three or four get-togethers ago, I remembered he still had the book. So I asked him when I was getting it back.

He said never.

If it was all right with me, he’d buy me another copy instead. But he wanted this one with my notes in the margins, so he could read it when he felt the need.

I said to consider the book a gift, one that I was especially pleased to be giving.

For it meant my little brother was planning to do something I have been doing for years, and has never failed to provide solace when solace is what I need. To reread stuff that’s already been a comfort to me.

Now I know you may not have the time or the inclination to read a full book of Stoic philosophy, and that I have written about The Obstacle Is the Way once before. But it’s also a pretty safe bet that you or someone close to you has dealt with or is dealing with circumstances similar to the ones that challenged my brother last summer.

And that it’s never too early to start Christmas shopping.

So let me suggest an alternative to The Obstacle Is the Way that’s in reality a less-than-full book alternative: The Stoicism Book of Quotes (Hatherleigh Press, 2023) by Nick Benas and Kortney Yasenka. I call it a less-than-full book alternative because the more than 200 inspirational quotations it contains are grouped according to topic.

So there’s no need to read cover to cover.

If you come home one night completely wiped out from spending eight hours in a toxic workplace, you can directly go to the section titled “Toxicity,” maybe read the page-or-so preface, and then contemplate what some of the greatest Stoic minds offer about your problem. One observation I particularly like there comes from Seneca: “To bear troubles with a calm mind robs misfortune of its strength and burden.”

In the intro, Benas and Yasenka focus on one of the beliefs inherent in Stoicism that’s as essential now as it was in the Hellenistic Age: to live “in agreement with nature.” Something they claim that can indeed occur living in today’s world if you take a “deeper look” into what you can and cannot control in order to make the best of a given situation while - and here’s the all-important part - “being at peace” with it.

So if you’re feeling a bit mentally adrift and life just doesn’t seem to be making a whole lot of sense, go to the section titled “Mindset” in search of a saying to improve yours. One that does that job for me comes from Marcus Aurelius.

“External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them, which you can erase right now.”

Something else you may want to erase is bad behavior. Or maybe you’d just like for yours to be a bit better.

Either way, you know the drill by now. Open the book to the section titled “Behavior” and look for a quotation that speaks to you.

It could very well be this one from Epictetus: “If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.” Or one of my favorites from the Stoic philosopher I consider my favorite, Marcus Aurelius: “Be tolerant of others and strict with yourself.”

In the conclusion, Benas and Yasenka make a powerful claim about quotations: That the right ones can “pry open new beliefs and reexamine old ones.” That the end result of doing so just might cause you to “gain new acceptances and foster new reasoning.”

Not only do I believe that to be true, but also that The Stoicism Book of Quotes will do that for you. Or for someone you know and care about.

So why not buy this book for yourself or someone else as a Christmas present? You can easily do so at Amazon.com - where it receives a five-star rating.