The School of Life: An Emotional Education

by The School of Life

Surely a genuine devotion to calm would mean ongoing serenity? But this isn’t a fair judgment, because being calm all the time isn’t ever a viable option. What counts is the commitment one is making to the idea of being a little calmer than last year. We can legitimately count as lovers of calm when we ardently seek to grow calmer, not when we succeed at being calm on all occasions. However frequent the lapses, it is the devotion that matters. Furthermore, it is a psychological law that those who are most attracted to calm will almost certainly also be especially irritable and by nature prone to particularly high levels of anxiety. We have a mistaken picture of what lovers of calm look like if we assume them to be among the most tranquil of the species. Typically, lovers of something are not the people who already possess it but those who are hugely aware of how much they lack it