Calm

Calm. This is something that most people like and perhaps even strive for. It is the absence of disturbance.

Or is it?

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am a calm person. I’m not overly emotional most of the time. Even if I’m incredibly angry, or even excited about something, I don’t usually show it. I’m not one for public emotional displays. I have been in situations that most would describe as simply fucked up, if not horribly chaotic, but kept my composure and did what needed to be done in the moment. I am the epitome of the interview catchphrase “I work well under pressure”.

I explained how I do this to someone once. I likened it to clinical detachment, which is the term that the medical field uses to refer to what a doctor does to remain objective when treating a patient. I don’t know jack about how they are trained for that, however. But, I can give you detailed facts of what happened in any given situation; I just lock the emotions out and stick to the logic and the facts. Emotion and logic don’t mix well – kinda like pure sodium and water. It’s a violent reaction between two elements – something to avoid. So, I bottle things up, I shut them down, I compartmentalize, I bury them, save them in a little box stored for later – whatever euphemism you want to use for flat out not dealing with the emotional side of something. Is this healthy? Probably not. But it works.

And, let’s be real here. That calmness, in many ways, for me or doctors or whomever else, is simply a façade. I can’t speak for everyone, but I do know that inside my mind, where no one else can go or hear what’s going on, it can be an outright hellish place. Brimming with disturbance and chaos, depending on the situation.

That said, I’d like to challenge the idea that calm is the absence of disturbance. I would say that it is the absence of objective evidence of disturbance.

For example. Imagine a lake on a sunny, mildly breezy day. The lake is “calm”. There may be a few ripples here and there, a random family of ducks swimming around, whatever. Objectively speaking, just about anyone would say that the lake scene you have imagined is a calm one. That’s not necessarily the case, however, and depends greatly on point of reference. From above the surface, yes, everything looks calm. But under the surface? There are life or death battles between rivals going on; predators on the hunt, prey terrified for their lives, hiding in the depths. There may also be explosions of new life depending on the time of year.

The same can be said in fields such as physics or chemistry. What is observable from your perspective is sometimes not at all the reality of what is going on.

Being calm is a strength in many ways, but, like so many things in life dealing with humans, people don’t always realize exactly what they are witnessing. There is a great deal of effort involved in maintaining that calm, in cultivating the mindset to achieve it in the first place.

The next time you see someone or something that is “calm”, take a moment to realize and appreciate that appearances are not all they’re cracked up to be. That there may be so much more under the surface that you are not aware of and not even considering.