Benign equanimity

 

Subject: Benign equanimity 

"The time has come the walrus said to talk of many things, of shoes and ships and  sealing wax and cabbages and kings".
Our conversations these days are not as rich or varied as this, we talk of the episodes on tv or the saga being played out in Parliament, the things we eat and the places we might wish to visit but seldom do we talk about our inner feelings or the deep conflicts which lie within. For the privileged few it's a trip to the shrink to unload our troubles, for others the majority, it's a system of burying them under layers of subterfuge.
I'm lucky in that I have come to terms with most of my demons and the daily blog let's off a great deal of steam.

But all around us walk the mentally wounded, people who are so destabilised that a wrong word or action can throw them into a rage. I remember years ago working in a mental institution for seriously impaired people, dangerous people who were kept locked away for years, heavily sedated and constantly watched. I remember asking one of the male nurses how they managed to cope each day surrounded by such unpredictable danger. It's not a problem he told me, we know the condition of the inmates but it's when we go outside on the streets that we are in danger from the un-sectioned individual who may just be walking towards you right now.

Considering the fine balance and narrow path a functioning human being has to tread as they come up against the hurdles and barriers to so many of the things we wish to do, is it any wonder some people boil up and lash out.
The calm head who can rationalise a route through the impediments presented in our lives often relies on deflecting the impact from the personal to a calculation which says that everyone is in the same boat and the weight of each dilemma is therefore, in some way shared. 
The very presumption that our goals are anymore other than just goals goes a long way to taking the pressure off to succeed when in all probability, we will to varying degrees fail. If we could see failure not in terms of its juxtaposition to success but as more a default position in which we live our lives in a sense of 'benign equanimity'.