Self-Command

Self-Command gives irritation a useful stopping point

On the crowded train home, a backpack bumps your arm for the third time. Its owner turns to check the route map, and the bag makes another tour of your elbow. Your proposed reply is becoming municipal in scale. You pause and ask, “Could you move your bag a little?” They bring it forward. The problem needed a few inches and one sentence.

Finding the balance in Self-Command

Make a clear request when a fellow commuter’s backpack repeatedly bumps you.

The useful measure is what your words can accomplish here. Feeling irritation does not oblige you to distribute it.

What Self-Command makes possible

Restraint can keep a passing inconvenience from becoming the event both people carry into the next encounter. It preserves room for a clear request, including a firm one when needed. You remain able to say what would help without adding an insult whose only purpose is to deliver the feeling back to somebody.

Self-Command in ordinary life

A suitcase in the station hall

When a wheel catches your shoe, acknowledge the apology and ask for room to pass. The hall does not need a courtroom.

A sharp reply at a counter

State the information you need without returning the insult. You can end an unproductive exchange.

Nearby virtues, different work

Equanimity

Equanimity concerns inner steadiness; Self-Command can guide a response even while irritation is still present.

Courtesy

Courtesy gives the eventual response a considerate form; Self-Command creates room to choose it.

Attentiveness

These two train scenes deliberately reverse the inconvenience. Here someone else’s bag bumps you, and Self-Command helps you choose a useful reply. In Attentiveness, your own bag is in the way, and the work begins with noticing.

Self-Command and its counterfeits

Saving the insult

Rehearsing a cruel reply for later counterfeits Self-Command. The useful work is redirecting the response toward the actual problem.

Never objecting

Treating every firm request as a failure counterfeits Self-Command. Restraint can support a clear boundary.

How to cultivate Self-Command

1. Let the other person finish or respond.

2. Name the practical result you want from speaking.

3. Remove the part of the reply whose only purpose is to wound.

Try it today

In a minor everyday irritation, pause long enough to identify the practical request you would make. Use that request if speaking would help.

Questions worth returning to

• What would I like to be different after I speak?
• Which part of my reply serves only to pass on the irritation?

Keep the practice proportionate

This concerns minor ordinary friction. You may leave a hostile exchange rather than practice through it.

Quotations and further reading

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

1. We infect the world with our ill-humours.

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

   Gardiner traces how an affront can be passed from one person to the next. This sharp sentence gives a reason to stop a small irritation before it becomes somebody else’s unpleasant encounter.

2. When we blame in another man the excesses of love, of grief, of resentment, we not only consider the ruinous effects which they tend to produce, but the little occasion which was given for them.

   Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Part I, Section I, Chapter III

   Smith asks us to consider both the effects of an emotion and its proportion to the occasion. A bump from a backpack can call for a request without deserving the full speech that irritation prepares.

3. Their brows were knit, and their eyes rolled quickly; when pushed against by fellow-wayfarers they evinced no symptom of impatience, but adjusted their clothes and hurried on.

   Edgar Allan Poe · The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 5 · The Man of the Crowd

   Poe’s narrator watches pedestrians absorb the jostling of a busy London street and continue on their way. This particular observation shows an irritation ending without an exchange of insults, even though the narrator’s later judgments of strangers become increasingly unreliable.

4. For they said, it was a shame to quarrel upon Christmas Day.

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

   The Ghost of Christmas Present has restored the good humor of people who jostled one another while carrying dinners. Dickens gives them a shared reason to let the quarrel end.

5. Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her—that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side.

   George Eliot · Middlemarch · Chapter XLII

   The narrator describes Dorothea’s anger after a painful exchange with her husband. The sentence captures anger’s power to make its own verdict feel unanimously confirmed, before reflection has had a hearing.

6. Temper, indeed, is no test of truth; but warmth and earnestness are a proof at least of a man's own conviction of the rectitude of that which he maintains.

   Charles Lamb · Elia and The Last Essays of Elia · Popular Fallacies, VII

   Lamb defends an earnest London law-stationer against a smoother opponent who mistakes composure for being right. Self-command should make a concern easier to express; a calm manner alone does not settle whose concern is justified.

7. He would have had the victory, not only over the boor, but over himself, and that is the victory that counts.

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

   Gardiner argues that the lift attendant in his opening story could have answered rudeness with composure. The sentence locates the consequential victory in governing one’s response.

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