Saying yes to life: on embracing equanimity

When we trust that we are the ocean, we will not fear the waves

Jul 07, 2025

Hello, marvelous people! I hope you all enjoyed the long holiday weekend and are finding ways to stay cool. Quite a few people signed up for this Substack since my last post, so for those who did, welcome! I’m really glad you’re here and hope you enjoy my posts.

I’ll be headed to a silent meditation retreat in the Catskills on Friday, and I’m both eager and a bit anxious as I’ve never done one before. If any of you have attended a meditation retreat before—silent or not—please let me know about your experience in the comments below! I’m sure I’ll write about it here at some point, maybe as soon as my next post.

In the meantime, I’m going to talk a bit about equanimity.

That’s right, I said equanimity. And yes, I know it’s one of those lofty, ten-dollar words, the kind you may have once seen on a vocabulary flashcard, for those of you old enough to have taken the SAT when it still had analogies and sentence completions. But trust me, equanimity is important. Let me explain why…

“For with what art thou discontented? With the badness of men? Recall to thy mind this conclusion: that rational animals exist for one another, and to endure is a part of justice, and that men do wrong involuntarily, and consider how many, after mutual enmity, suspicion, hatred and fighting have been struck dead, reduced to ashes, and be quiet at last…for the whole earth is a point, and how small a nook in it is this thy dwelling…”

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Let’s face it: we’re living in challenging times.

Extremism is on the rise, and so are cruelty and indifference. Dictators and authoritarians are reveling in their power to suppress others, distort the truth and stifle dissent. We’re turning our allies into our enemies, breaking down lines of communication and cooperation, and becoming a smaller, meaner country, one that contracts into itself and cares only about the concerns of the privileged and powerful.

There is a natural tendency in moments like this–moments of chaos, oppression, and suffering–to feel a strong aversion to what is happening.

A desire to reject the present moment and wish that it were different. Of course we want things to be different. Who wants to witness the coarsening of our culture, the deterioration of our values, the elevation of bullies, the glorification of incompetence? We know things aren’t right and that they won’t be getting better anytime soon. And so naturally we want to react. We want to do something about it.

Our impulses tell us to resist. To go on social media and write posts about how awful this moment is, and to find solace and solidarity with others who feel the same way. We watch the pundits and listen to the podcasters reflect upon the horror we’re witnessing, and we find some small comfort knowing we’re not alone in our outrage. Many of us then do the work of resistance: demonstrating, protesting, boycotting, calling our representatives, demanding change. Finding strength in numbers.

This type of resistance is necessary. Done the right way, it can be a force of good, a way that calls upon recognizing our interconnectedness and our shared humanity.

Think of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela. Possibly the greatest lesson these great leaders and the movements they inspired imparted to us may be the idea that resistance does not require us to hate our enemies—in fact, it can be hopeful, optimistic and inclusive. Much like Gandhi, King and Mandela, we should remind ourselves that what we’re resisting are the forces and systems in place, not the moment we are in. We must learn to accept the moment. We must rise up to meet it and see it as part of our universal experience.

Not accept the injustice or the cruelty, but accept that this too is our life, that we are indeed already here. We need to pause and sit with our feelings and our pain, and hopefully we’ll come to see that moments like this are simply part of the fabric of our lives. Each and every one of us will experience moments of joy, sadness, elation, peace, grief, pleasure and pain. Heck, sometimes we’ll feel all these things in the same day! We’re not always going to be happy. Some days–some weeks, months, or even years–it may seem like life is being unbearably vicious with us. And yet we should neither run away from nor too quickly react to these moments with aversion or judgment. We can learn to sit with every moment of our lives–even the unhappy ones–and say, yes, this too is a part of me. As Tara Brach says, “When we trust that we are the ocean, then we don’t fear the waves. When we forget that we are the ocean, then we are always seasick.”

Equanimity is the sense of being at peace with whatever comes your way.

It’s a deep acceptance of the present, and an acceptance of the self within that present moment. It’s you telling yourself that you know things are a hot fucking mess right now, but you’re not going to panic or despair or give in to unhealthy rage. You’re going to be in this moment. You’re going to allow it to be—whatever it is—and from that place of acceptance, you’ll figure out what you need to do about it. Equanimity allows the space and freedom for us to make better decisions. It’s the pause that allows us to consider not just our own egoic needs, but the more cosmic needs of all mankind. It’s the space where kindness, compassion and joy can arise, even towards—maybe even especially towards—people who we perceive as our enemies. Because in that pause we can notice our shared humanity. We can recognize their suffering, their ego, their myopia and their vulnerabilities as reflections of our own.

Learning how to rest in equanimity has brought me a lot of peace these past few months. It’s allowed me to react to the news with less anger and anxiety. It’s allowed me to have deeper conversations with friends about what to do about it, discussions about volunteering for vulnerable communities, organizing more locally, and just generally embracing the idea of spreading compassion and peace by being the person I want to see more of in the world. It may seem trite to say this, but actually it’s stunningly profound: the greatest thing we can do right now is to embrace kindness and compassion for others. To insist on it every day, especially for people who can’t seem to embrace it for others or for themselves.

This doesn’t mean giving up on your values or surrendering to any forces that are perpetuating suffering or injustice.

Equanimity doesn’t mean adopting an attitude of indifference. It simply allows you the time to reflect upon your values, and helps you avoid indulging in the very things you detest in others: Pettiness. Cruelty. Self-righteousness. Whataboutism. Equanimity tells us it’s not enough that we react, but that it matters how we react. When our reactions are more considered, our subsequent actions will be too.

When we embrace equanimity, we can recognize these baser instincts for what they are: a need for certainty and control arising from fear. Our fear and our need for control are deep-seated human survival instincts, so we shouldn’t chastise ourselves when these feelings arise. Our egos may feel momentarily powerful when we assert our need for control, yet we aren’t really powerful. Truth is, most things in our life will forever remain out of our control. When we learn to see our need for control for what it is, we are then free to make wiser choices.

Recently a friend of mine (an Irish friend, to boot!) responded to another friend of mine in a group chat by bringing up a passage from Pirkei Avot, the tractate of the Jewish Mishnah that in English is referred to as “The Ethics of the Fathers.” Here is that passage, in the original Hebrew:

הַיּוֹם קָצָר וְהַמְּלָאכָה מְרֻבָּה. לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה

Which in English translates as: “The time is short, and the work is plentiful. It is not your duty to finish the work, neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”

I think this saying succinctly summarizes one of the great paradoxes of our lives.

Our work here on earth is so plentiful, and yet our time is so short. We constantly feel like it’s upon us to finish the work—and yet we know we never will. Even still, we must never neglect it. We must always keep trying. It’s this very paradox that inhabiting a sense of equanimity helps us address. We learn not to avoid the truth of our own mortality, or the truth that we’ll never make all the suffering go away. At the same time, we understand that we shouldn’t shirk from our responsibility to do what we can, or add to the suffering of others by taking actions which do not align with our values.

Look, embracing equanimity isn’t easy. Doing so has forced me to confront uncomfortable truths about my tendency to avoid the difficult spaces and moments of my life. I know this essay might trigger a defensive reaction in some people, so let me reiterate: embracing equanimity is not embracing resignation. It simply means meeting the moment we’re in with clarity and compassion. Another one of my favorite Tara Brach sayings is “everything that arises, belongs.” Imagine that: everything in your life, every moment each of us is experiencing, belongs. This doesn’t mean we have to accept the moment—we only have to accept that it belongs. Perhaps it’s part of our individual or collective evolution. Or perhaps it’s just proof of the fact that we’re alive, and part of being alive includes suffering.

Which is what I’ve come to understand: I’m already here. I don’t get to choose what I’m here for. I have to be here for all of it—the good, the bad and everything in between. And accepting the wholeness of my life is itself a kind of freedom.

Thanks so much for reading! If you have any thoughts about equanimity or anything else discussed in this post, please feel free to leave a comment: