STABLE

A debut guide offers a core group of principles designed to help readers in their search for “truth in its purest form.”

Early in her book, Lewis confesses that despite her Christian faith and upbringing, she found herself wandering in life, feeling “an insatiable hunger to find out how to be happy once and for all.” While asking such evergreen questions as what is the meaning of life and “how do we lace love into every facet of our lives in such a way that we live in higher quality?,” she read extensively and gradually began to discover “universal  connections” between the viewpoints of “scientists, religious teachers, philosophers, yogis, motivational speakers, and even musicians.” From this wide-ranging mixture of sources, she eventually developed what she refers to as the “STABLE philosophy,” in which the word “stable” acts as an acronym for a set of principles she advocates as a method of illuminating the important things in life. The first two letters of the word stand for “Sound Thought,” with the author stressing that optimism is always a conscious choice: “You can hear the positive and you can hear the negative. Let the positive win!” The “AB” represents the principle of “Always Believe,” which Lewis frames as a call to a consistent and fervent manifestation of her Christian faith. The final letters signify “Life of Excellence,” a principle that applies to daily objectives—“Be a light in a dark world,” Lewis urges. The prose throughout her heartfelt book is clear, involving, and passionate, with the author warning her readers that “fear is the biggest obstacle to accomplishing anything at all in this life.” Along the way, Lewis occasionally misrepresents the positions of the scientific and/or atheist communities (members do not believe humans were “created from nothing,” for instance—creation ex nihilo is a religious notion). But her account of her own personal journey from confusion to the clarity of her STABLE philosophy has a powerfully persuasive narrative quality.

An enthusiastically conceived and readable breakdown of principles for embracing an upright religious life.