Julia Baird was at her lowest point. Her heart was broken. She was barely eating. Like all us when we’ve been down, when we’ve doubted ourselves, she found herself saying, “I just don’t know how I am going to get through this.”

As she recounts in her beautiful book Phosphorescence (if you haven’t read it, you can grab a copy from Ryan’s bookshop The Painted Porch), Baird’s therapist told her about a similar moment in his own life. He had despaired. He doubted he could get through it. Then a mentor grabbed him by the proverbial shoulders and gave him a dose of what is essentially the core of Stoic philosophy. “It is now that everything that you have been given in your life matters,” he told him, “this is what you draw on. Your parents, your friends, your work, your books, everything you have ever been told, everything you have ever learned, this is when you use that.”

Remember the Stoics believed that we were always training and always supposed to be training. The idea was so that when life or future hit us with something we’d be in a position to reply like that, to recognize that everything we’d experienced and learned up until that point was preparing us for that very moment. And when Marcus Aurelius talked about using obstacles as fuel, this is also what he meant. Everything that happens to us in life—good or bad—is shaping us, informing us literally and figuratively for the future. That is, if we choose to accept the information or the lesson or the challenge.

So whatever you’re dealing with today, whatever you’ve been hit with today, you must understand: This is it. This is the moment to draw on all that training. Now is the time to use it. And understand also this: Sometime in the distant future, after you’ve survived this (and you will) you will draw on this experience also.

Repeat ad infinitum.