Calm

The longing to be calm can be a deeply significant and precious part of one’s character, especially when turmoil grips the mind.

We’re working with the highly misleading background assumption that the lover of something is the person who is really good at it. But the person who loves something is the one who is hugely aware of how much they lack it. And, therefore, of how much they need it.

The more calm matters to us, the more we will be aware of all the very many times when we have been less calm than we might have been.

what we are really up against is anxiety as a permanent feature of life, something irrevocable, existential, dogged – and responsible for ruining a dominant share of our brief time on earth

The news has been much worse before and things were, in the end, OK. People behaving very badly is a normal state of affairs. It was ever thus: there have always been disappointing leaders and greedy magnates. There have always been existential threats to the human race and civilisation. It makes no sense, and is a form of twisted narcissism, to imagine that our era has any kind of monopoly on perversity or chaos.

Reading Suetonius suggests that it is not fatal for societies to be in trouble; it is usual for things to go rather badly. In this respect, reading ancient history generates the opposite emotions to scanning today’s news.

One important use we can make of history is to resort to it as an antidote to anxiety and panic.

This is true even though knowing how to cope better with anxiety is in most lives a more urgent and important task than steering one’s space rocket around the galaxies.

idea of attaining calm via an encounter with a new scale. It’s the view that we might be agitated not simply because we are tired but because we have the wrong perspective on the events in our lives – and that therefore the kind of travel that would benefit us would need to promote a better sense of scale.

The problem is, our minds are structured so as to give maximum attention to what is happening now – whereas, to actually see the importance of anything we have to situate it in a much larger frame of reference.