I felt sad the other day, and I didn’t want to do anything except watch feel-good movies and eat chocolate ice cream. In the days before I was sober, I would reach for whiskey. My brain is conditioned to retreat and seek out any and all pleasure when I feel that life is not living up to my expectations. Those days can come once in a while, or back-to-back for several days. Even with the awareness of being in a funk that is afforded to me through my mindfulness meditation practice, I struggle. The very best that I can do some days is to accept how I feel, and try to not let it affect other people. I legitimately don’t have the energy for anything else. Giving a fuck every single day is not easy, and we shouldn’t feel guilty when we can’t do it sometimes.
I have this persistent fantasy that one day, while meditating, a spontaneous insight will strike me that permanently endows me with perfect equanimity. From then on, nothing will faze me. I’ll tackle every obstacle in my life with confidence and optimistic enthusiasm. Intellectually I know this is an impossibility, but it doesn’t stop me from wanting it. That’s not how equanimity works—it’s not how any state of mind works. Everything fluctuates.
In Buddhist psychology, equanimity is considered to be an evenness of mind that persists and is unaffected by fear, desire, or other trappings of the ego. It is a cultivated strength or virtue, and thought to be essential for the realization of truth and wisdom to arise.
I am likely far from achieving equanimity as an enduring and persistent state of mind, but I am not a complete stranger to what it feels like; with intense practice, I have experienced serene states of equanimity during silent retreats, and even for short periods of time following them. I have always experienced a “normalization” process as routine life resumes, but I remember what it feels like, and I still achieve brief moments of it from time to time.
In thinking about how equanimity feels, I realized something within the context of my recent funk: equanimity seemingly exists, just briefly, in the moment between the awareness that I have no fucks left to give and my mind wanting to act on its craving for pleasure. This is difficult to explain, and so it may not make a whole lot of sense—especially for those unfamiliar with mindfulness practice—but I’m going to give it a shot:
Imagine a boat anchor attached to a long chain. When the anchor is dumped overboard and sinks into the water, the chain moves so quickly that it’s impossible to visually lock onto any single link. This chain is like my mental stage going from “contemplating that things aren’t the way I want them” to “I should watch movies and eat ice cream” (Buddhist thought calls this kind of causal chaining dependent origination). Normally it moves so fast from one to the other, I don’t perceive any of the links. But in reflecting on my “funk state” recently, I got a brief glimpse of a single link in the chain that felt similar to equanimity.
So what? It might seem like a silly and pointless observation, but the implication (assuming I’m not completely mistaken) is that between realizing I don’t have the energy to give a fuck and my mind reaching for pleasure, a brief “unclenching” happens that feels like equanimity. If the anchor can be slowed or halted at that moment, the equanimity is already there and I just need to dwell within it. If I can do that, and somehow short-circuit the rest of the chain, I can stop the anchor from sinking further.
I want to make sure that I don’t go too close to implying indifference, which is the near enemy of equanimity. The link in the chain, the moment that I sense I’m glimpsing, is not a moment of feeling “I don’t care,” and it is not a result of not caring. That is an important distinction. Within equanimity, as I have experienced it, I care quite deeply. Another way to describe the individual link is to say that the “unclenching” or “letting go” is akin to releasing the energy being devoted to expecting things to be different. To “not care about how things are” is something very different than to “cease obsessing about how things could be different.” That is probably where the short-circuit may live.
So why relate equanimity to not giving a fuck at all if it comes too close to the near enemy of indifference? Because, I believe, what gives the insight weight is that the chain is made up of all these things together; it includes the potential indifference as well as the triggers for addictive and destructive behavior, but it also includes the moment of letting go, and that means equanimity is accessible amidst it all. It’s not something we need to create, but instead it is something already there that we need to cultivate further.
The more practical (and perhaps obvious) wisdom that comes from this is that we should feel even less guilty about those days when we struggle to give a fuck. In fact, we might need to experience our funks, our sadness, and our existential angst, in order to fully understand how we can push through, build strength, and persist in spite of them. Those experiences contain what we need to overcome them. So maybe next time, before I turn on the movie and reach for the chocolate ice cream, I’ll try to look back up the chain for my equanimity, and dwell in that part of me already wanting to let go.