Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

by The School of Life

The idea would be that a good relationship would involve strong agreement on a few pretty major matters, with the expectation that in a host of other areas there would be sharply divergent attitudes and ideas.

disagreement is what happens when love succeeds and you get to know someone close up across the full range of their life.

we can trace two major – and highly contrasting – attitudes, which can be summarised under the names ‘Romantic’ and ‘Classical

Authenticity vs politeness.

This way of seeing a partner’s failings makes us painfully agitated. The Weakness of Strength theory reminds us that many of our partner’s irritating and disappointing characteristics are actually the shadow sides of things we really like about them.

We get infatuated with such people. We imagine how lovely it would be to be with them. And this makes us more and more irritable around our own partners.

One of the most fundamental paths to calm is the power to hold on, even in very challenging situations, to a distinction between what someone does – and what they meant to do.

self-hatred. The less we like ourselves, the more we appear in our own eyes as really rather plausible targets for mockery and harm.

is necessarily true (or pleasant) to do so, but because it feels familiar; and because we are the prisoners of past patterns we

It’s very touching that we live in a world where we have learned to be so kind to children; it would be even nicer if we learned to be a little more generous towards the childlike parts of one another.

Part of becoming a good teacher means altering how we speak to ourselves – and then, in turn, others.

that reminds us that we may be worthy of affection even if we fail and that being a winner is only one part, and not necessarily the most important part, of one’s identity.

Politeness does not prevent a person from feeling angry or upset or hurt. What it does is delay the expression of the feeling.

It’s not you: it’s the stage of history you happen to be living through.

It’s a strangely consoling tragic idea that imagination always, inevitably, outstrips the potential. Everyone is unfulfilled, and that’s just a consequence of the odd way our minds have evolved.

The garden is guided by a single simple idea: that what is presented externally to our senses can have a powerful impact on what happens to us internally,

What the Sublime does is – very unusually – to foreground our engagement with the larger horizons of existence.

faint impression on the page of history’. Everything gets forgotten.

Travel, Beauty, Status and Love: the four great contemporary ideals around which our fantasies of calm collect and that taken together are responsible for the lion’s share of the frenzied activities of the modern economy:

The single most important move is acceptance. There is no need – on top of everything else – to be anxious that we are anxious. The mood is no sign that our lives have gone wrong, merely that we are alive.

learn to laugh about our anxieties – laughter being the exuberant

If you pay attention only to someone’s active behaviour, you’re engaging with only a narrow slice of how they are. It is their longings you need to see or imagine.

Despite having slammed the door, felt enraged, cursed and had a bout of anxiety, one can still be an authentic and honourable lover of calm.