Equanimity
Marcus Aurelius wrote his journals in a tent on the Danube frontier between battles, and what comes through, more than any single argument, is the sound of a man trying to talk himself into a particular state of mind. Again and again. Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. He wasn’t reminding himself the world contained these people. He was preparing himself to encounter them without being thrown. The Stoics called the state apatheia. The Buddhists, working out a closely related discipline a continent away, called it upekkha. The English word both traditions get translated into is equanimity, which is the most boring and most demanding word in the English language for what they were after.
The mistake almost everyone makes about equanimity is to confuse it with detachment. It is not the absence of feeling. The Stoic on the rack is permitted to weep; the Buddhist watching her child suffer is permitted to grieve. What equanimity withdraws is not the feeling but the demand that the world be other than it is. The wave breaks against the cliff and the cliff does not argue with it. The cliff is not numb. It simply isn’t operating on the assumption that the wave was supposed to ask permission.
This is harder than it sounds, because most suffering — Marcus, the Buddha, and the contemporary therapist would all agree on this — comes not from what happened but from the part of us that is still arguing it shouldn’t have. The argument continues for hours, days, decades. Equanimity is the discipline of letting the argument end. The event is admitted to have occurred. The cost of pretending it didn’t is recognized as higher than the cost of accepting that it did. Whatever is left after the argument is what you actually have to work with.
The library has breath and composure for the somatic version, shoshin for the cognitive version, antifragility for the structural version. Equanimity is the temperamental version, and it is the substrate beneath the others. The grappler whose breath stays steady when the choke tightens has equanimity at the level of the nervous system. The diagnostician whose hand does not waver when the news is bad has equanimity at the level of professional bearing. The parent who sits with the child’s grief without immediately trying to fix it has equanimity at the level of relationship. The skill is the same skill, applied at different scales.
What makes the practice difficult is that it cannot be displayed. Performed equanimity is not equanimity; it is composure-as-costume, and most observers can feel the difference. The genuine state is mostly invisible — what’s visible is the absence of the agitation that would otherwise be there, and absence is hard to credit. Marcus’s journals are great precisely because he was writing them only for himself, and they show, decade by decade, a man not quite achieving what he is asking himself to achieve. The honesty is the achievement.
Notice, in the next hour, how much of your internal weather is the residue of arguing with what already happened. Some of it is useful — grief, regret, the data the past has bequeathed you. Most of it is not. Equanimity is the slow practice of letting the unuseful portion go, on the recognition that it cannot change what occurred and is making it harder to act well in what comes next. You will not achieve it today. You may not achieve it in this lifetime. That has never been the point.