Equanimity

Equanimity gives room to revise an ordinary day

Your usual machine at the laundromat has a large out-of-order sign. You have apparently developed a personal relationship with number four. Number six is available and shows no sign of knowing that it is your second choice. You move the basket, check the time and get on with the wash. The afternoon has changed its arrangement; it need not change its entire character.

Finding the balance in Equanimity

Use an available washing machine when the familiar one is out of service.

A changed arrangement need not become a judgment on the place, its people or your ability to handle an afternoon.

What Equanimity makes possible

A steady response leaves more of your attention available for the next workable choice. A small disruption can stay small enough to share the afternoon with a conversation, a page of a book or the satisfaction of finishing an errand. Other people also get to meet you without having to answer for what happened ten minutes earlier.

Equanimity in ordinary life

A canceled talk

Let yourself be disappointed, then decide whether the exhibition next door still interests you.

An unexpected welcome

Enjoy a compliment from a shopkeeper without making the next indifferent greeting a personal reversal.

Nearby virtues, different work

Patience

Patience allows something to take time; Equanimity holds steadiness through both welcome and unwelcome changes.

Self-Command

Self-Command restrains a harmful impulse; Equanimity concerns the inner balance from which a response comes.

Equanimity and its counterfeits

The cheerful mask

Insisting that nothing matters can counterfeit Equanimity by concealing a real disappointment. Acknowledge the change plainly.

A day already condemned

Treating one failed plan as proof that the whole day is ruined abandons Equanimity before the next possibility arrives.

How to cultivate Equanimity

1. Describe the change at its actual scale.

2. Separate what you feel from what the situation establishes.

3. Choose the next action after allowing both facts and feelings a place.

Try it today

When a modest plan changes, name the inconvenience in one sentence. Then identify a workable next step without making a verdict about the whole day.

Questions worth returning to

• What changed, and what remains available?
• Am I asking this person to answer for an earlier frustration?

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.

   Robert Louis Stevenson · Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers · Crabbed Age and Youth

   Stevenson is discussing the changing seasons of a life, after a boy’s plan to return forever to his toys. The smaller application here is the same willingness to revise a plan without making the change an enemy.

2. It is true we were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger, my cousin.

   Charles Lamb · Elia and The Last Essays of Elia · Old China

   Elia answers Bridget’s longing for their old London pleasures by noticing another change: they were younger then. Steadiness can begin with a more accurate account of what has changed, rather than blaming everything on the present arrangement.

3. In lightening their spirits he lightened his own task.

   A. G. Gardiner · Many Furrows · On Saying “Please”

   Gardiner’s considerate bus conductor makes a difficult working day easier for passengers and himself. Equanimity has a practical return here: irritation does not have to supply the atmosphere of every encounter.

4. There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.

   Charles Dickens · A Christmas Carol · Stave III, Scrooge’s Third Visitor

   Dickens places Christmas goodwill in muddy, misty streets. The weather and the public mood remain different things; circumstances do not have to dictate the whole quality of a shared day.

5. He will have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people and opinions.

   Robert Louis Stevenson · Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers · An Apology for Idlers

   Stevenson’s experienced idler has learned some distance from his own enthusiasms. That “cool allowance” suggests a steadiness spacious enough for the people who do not follow our preferred plan.

6. What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming.

   Walt Whitman · Complete Prose Works · Specimen Days, The Lesson of a Tree

   Whitman is contemplating a yellow poplar in “The Lesson of a Tree.” Its steadiness offers him an image of character whose substance matters more than the impression it makes on a spectator.

7. For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold his peace, it is commendable; but for a multitude, it is great mastery.

   Charles Lamb · Elia and The Last Essays of Elia · A Quaker’s Meeting

   Lamb describes the shared stillness of a Quaker meeting. A public gathering can sustain quiet together, suggesting that composure need not depend on escaping all other people.

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