Posted on:Dec 31 2021
I’ve been thinking more about this quality, or state of being, since my dad passed away last year. One of the ways I keep him close is by reflecting on what I learned from him. He was a great role model for many desirable attributes and equanimity was one of them.
“Equanimity” is mental calmness. Composure. Evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation.
Evenness of temper served my dad well in his long career as an orthopedic surgeon. As a kid, I didn’t know what all he did as a doctor. As I got older, though, I wondered where and how he learned the kind of composure required to stay calm while looking at bloody broken body parts, figuring out how to put the person back together, replacing a hip or repairing a knee or shoulder that was causing pain, using surgery-grade power tools (saws and drills) and a variety of hardware (plates, pins, screws, implants).
A piece fell into place when, in an acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award, my dad spoke of a book he read in medical school. The book was titled, “Aequanimitas,” and it contained selections of William Osler’s essays and speeches.
If you google around, you’ll learn that William Osler was one of the most influential physicians of all time. Osler lived from 1849 to 1918; he stressed bedside teaching, hard work, medical history and lifelong learning; he was a prolific writer and his textbook became the most popular and widely read treatise on medicine in the world.
My dad kept an excerpt from a 1905 speech given by Osler in his pocket secretary throughout his career. In Osler’s “Three Rules of Conduct For One’s Everyday Life,” my dad felt as if he’d discovered an important secret of human life: do the day’s work to the best of one’s ability by giving it your full attention; follow the golden rule; maintain your mental equilibrium.
What a synchronous trifecta!
Once again, as it often goes with life, something so simple, obvious, true, and essential, yet - thanks to some version of a tail-wagging-the-dog mind - we lose sight of it.
We lose sight of how much our frame of mind determines the quality of our life.
Because truly, what and how we think defines the character of our experience...minute by minute, day after day...and we do indeed have some say in the what and how.
It seems that one of our biggest hurdles in cultivating equanimity is getting in positive relationship with uncertainty. Uncertainty is unsettling, not knowing causes worry. We’d rather be in control, calling the shots, knocking things off our to-do list, planning life and living the plan.
But we can only plan so much and, sooner or later and sure enough, the vicissitudes of life show up. Problems arise. Unexpected bad news arrives. We forget. Something takes longer than we thought it would. Emotions intensify. We know this is how it goes. We know life contains uncertainty.
So we’d be wise to take a close look at how we think about, how we roll with, uncertainty, to weave expect-the-unexpected into our MO, because uncertainty is not going away.
For many of us, uncertainty is synonymous with unpredictability, unreliability, precariousness, anxiety, concern, confusion, distrust, skepticism, stress - you get the idea. Uncertainty = Problem.
What if, instead, we teach ourselves to get in positive relationship with uncertainty by thinking of it as a silver lining. That’s right, a revised starting point: Uncertainty = Silver Lining.
Silver lining is synonymous with things like the bright side, a comforting or hopeful prospect, an opportunity for growth, a break in the clouds - you get the idea. The stuff of a healthy, flexible, I-can-handle-it mindset.
Here’s the challenge we face: We humans are process-oriented, we like to plan, we like to work through our to-do list, but we are also usually notverygood predictors of how things will go and we “forget” that life contains uncertainty. So when something comes up that throws off the plan, the table is set for a situation in which life feels like an endless slogging process of solving problems.
Imagine if we train ourselves to approach uncertainty as both inevitable (i.e. maintain awareness that it can arrive at any time) and an opportunity to learn and grow. This has a huge upside: it will cut way down on worry...which opens the door to the ability to be deeply immersed in the moment-by-moment unfolding day...and a more hopeful feeling at the end of the day, a stronger "I can handle what comes up" muscle...bringiton day after thankyou day after grateful day.
Love you, Dad.
