Equanimity

Sylvia Boorstein’s book Happiness Is an Inside Job uses Buddhist principles as a way to avoid suffering and achieve happiness.  She recommends equanimity as an emotional state that allows us to respond appropriately to life's ups, downs, and neutrals.  Equanimity she says, “is the capacity of the mind to hold a clear view of whatever is happening, both externally and internally, as well as the ability of the mind to accommodate passion without losing its balance.  It’s the mind that sees clearly, that meets experience with cordial interest.”  Below is her example of meeting an everyday experience with goodwill. 

The overnight flight from San Francisco to Paris takes more than ten hours, and in the time between midnight and morning, the hours seem longer and the space between the seats in the coach section seems shorter.  When I get up to stretch, and perhaps walk down an aisle, I see men and women, old and young, large and small, all unknown to me, some traveling with young children, all trying to figure out how to be comfortable.  I see them wrapped up in airplane blankets, scrunched up into whatever position of repose they can organize for themselves, leaning on each other if they are traveling together or tying not to lean on each other if they aren’t.  Often a man or a woman is patrolling the aisle across from me, holding an infant against his or her chest and moving in the rocking gait that often soothes a baby’s distress.  I feel a pleasant intimacy with them.  I am also trying to stay comfortable.   I’m not frightened for them, or for me, because I’m relaxed about flying ad I assume we will land successfully, but I wish them well.  I enjoy the feeling of my own good-heartedness.  In fact, in that moment of mental hand-holding, all those people look a bit more familiar than ordinary strangers.  That moment of easy, impartial, benevolent connection—meta—buoys up my mind.  I feel better as I sit back down in my seat.

This is a typical Boorstein story showing how the ordinary is beautiful.