Balancing Act

Equanimity is not a word we hear an awful lot about.  I am not sure of its translation or usage in other languages, but am aware that in English, it doesn’t tend to sit in common parlance.  Perhaps that’s just a reflection of my experience, perhaps not.  We might, at first, see it as simple indifference.  This would, I think, miss out half the story.  Equanimity seems, to me, to be far more akin to powerlessness.  A straightforward acknowledgment of where we sit, in relation to the world, and to our fellow beings.

It carries with it a sense of our powerlessness as individuals, and as groups, over this world of conditions and of the suffering we will inevitably encounter and witness others also experience.  It implies also our powerlessness over others’ thoughts and feelings, reminding us that we have dominion over only our own minds and hearts.  We cannot seek to alter another’s feelings towards us, and we will doubtless come across those who love us, and those who perhaps do not.  We may even find that there are some people who not only don’t love us, they perhaps dislike us.  This is just the way it is. 

It is the third part of equanimity that intrigues me the most – highlighting to us those things that we can change, in our perceptions and the weight we attach to them.  It asks us to truthfully enquire whether the impressions that we are apt to form in an instant are deserving and worthy of the enduring respect we tend to give them.

Equanimity entails, I think, a softening and opening.  To manifest this quality we might allow ourselves to be surprised from time to time.  As we surprise ourselves, we might hold our realities a little less tightly, allowing those beliefs that do not serve us to drop away to create room for a future different to our past.