Serenity

While it’s sometimes beneficial to be filled with nervous energy and constantly opening up to every passing moment, being this way nonstop can be exhausting for both you and those around you. It’s often better to spend some time with those who can just relax without being "on" all the time (or expecting you to be), and with someone who will calm you down when you are stressed rather than feed it. On a personal level, more serenity in your life will open your heart and decisions to new and greater feelings of contentment and possibly even happiness. If you able to hold on to a sense of calm and peace while the world rages on, you will be able to find the time to appreciate your passing moments and gain the talent of being able to find enjoyable moments even while your struggle through less-than-ideal situations. While you shouldn’t turn yourself off to your emotions, you can benefit from being able to calm them down after you’ve expressed them so you can focus on living life—or similarly benefit simply being able to control them when you need to make slow, careful decisions.

While there is some similarity to this virtue and magnanimity, this trait is more about serenity as a part of calmly experiencing your daily life in peace and less about controlling your emotional responses in more extreme situations; magnanimity and serenity can certainly prop each other up as well, and trying to live one virtue to the extreme while you severely lag in the other will probably be nigh impossible. You may, in fact, want to consider working on them in tandem.

While working on your serenity, you will have to get in the habit of being more aware of your daily levels of stress. Many people, out of necessity, tend to ignore how stressed or even freaked out they are toward responsibilities or other things going on in their lives. You may find yourself one day suddenly unwilling to call old friends and relax, and having difficulty sleeping at night. You might be thoroughly confused. You might ask yourself, "What’s going on? Nothing bad is going on. Just the same old, same old at work and at home." It’s entirely possible, however, that a recurring stress has finally beaten down your resistance and you are just now feeling the repercussions of it. Perhaps some problem in a relationship or something that was said is really bothering you, and you’re too proud to admit that you have been affected by it. It’s also possible that your subconscious is working against you. You might consciously be excited and dedicated to getting your marriage to work, but you might suddenly find yourself down and depressed if your subconscious is terrified of continuing a difficult relationship with no foreseeable end in sight. You can be better at recognizing these hidden stresses and motivations with practice, and then you can be better prepared to fix your life problems or simply cope with them more successfully.

Another aspect of living a serene life is getting in the practice of dimming your response to emotional stimuli and daily problems. Now, one doesn’t necessarily want to diminish the positive emotional highs from their lives, but even then there are instances where over responding to positive events can cloud your judgment or encourage you to make irrational decisions. Most often, however, you will want to focus on how negative events affect your feelings of stress and your mood, and your ability to think of other matters besides these after you’ve given them their due time. The only way to do this is by practice, and likely using techniques to remind you that you are trying to change your attitude toward life since your old habits will be much stronger than your new ones for a long time to come—and you are going to need every help you can get. Over time you behavior will reflect a calmer reflection of yourself.

Finally, in order to lead a serene life will require you to make other changes to your life and habits. If you serenely float by as your finances and health or whatever crashes around you, you’ve turned a virtue into a trait of being irresponsible. If you have a lot of stress in your life over things you can have control over, then it’s high time to begin controlling those aspects of your life. This might mean improving organization, budgeting, cleaning habits, work habits, or whatever. Once your stress is diminished, your total level of serenity will increase naturally.

If you can attack serenity on all these levels, you truly can become a peaceful, calm influence on your peers and friends and in your own life.

Note: Some people might be ignoring trouble or issues due to unbearable stress or as a symptom of depression. This is probably not the more common situation, but if there is a chance that you are ignoring too many problems in your life, then don’t continue or justify this in the name of serenity.