When you hear the word ‘calm,’ what do you imagine?
In the current day, calm is a marketable state. It is sold as a serene face, small smile on the lips, eyes closed, with an out of focus but beautiful natural background. It is the home office that is perfectly tidy, with blonde wood and air diffusers. It’s the weekend getaway by the river, $50,000 car in the background. Calm is, literally, the name of an app.
I say this not to have a go at marketing, but because trends in what is marketed to us (like etymology) are interesting access points to the cultural psyche at any given moment. Calm is indisputably an end goal state for Americans in 2023. It is a goal precisely because we are so bad at it, because it is so elusive, because we feel that we are failing by not obtaining it.
So if we want it so badly, why are we failing at it?
Let’s start, as always, at the beginning. The word ‘calm’, by the 14th century, meant “windless, without motion or agitation.” It is most likely derived from the Latin Cauma “heat of the midday sun”, from the Greek Kaein “to burn.” At first glance, this all seems surprising. How does “heat of the sun” and “to burn” lead to the serene face atop the mountain?
The linkage seems to be in the result: that to burn from heat, to be in the midday sun, initiates rest, a time of non-activity. It is also ironic that a word rooted in “to burn” would come to mean “freed from passion or agitation,” given the way we associate passion with fire and burning, but there’s also a clever simplicity to it.
To be calm seems to have something to do with accepting our external reality and working with it rather than against it.
In a world before AC, before all the barriers that insulate us from the natural world, there are times in which the most ‘efficient’ thing to do is simply to rest, to be still. I want to press this point, because I think it is more radical than initially meets the eye. Think about it: when we chase after calmness in the modern day, what is the implicit understanding of calmness and why we are reaching for it? Is it treated as self sufficient, as a state whole unto itself, or as a booster, a compliment, a kind of lining that enables us to be more of what we already are (rushed, productive, yearning)?
In other words: do we really see calmness for what it is rather than calmness as an antidote? What if calmness isn’t the enlightened, permanent blanketing we hope it to be, but a singular piece of the puzzle? What if we could drop into a state of calmness consistently and without friction, without fomo, without self-aggrandizing the importance of it, and just as easily rouse ourselves into action once the sun’s light is a little less direct, once the world is beckoning us?
In Headspace training (a meditation app), there is a common refrain repeated: that the goal isn’t to empty the mind as though that is some permanent end state, but to minimize the reactivity to the mind in all of its states (including emptiness). This is a parallel sentiment to the reading of calm above. Calm is one state among many, and in a roundabout way, by accepting it as such, we are more likely to imbue the rest of our states with a sense of calm.
But then again, is it really that surprising that by freeing our white knuckled grasp on something we are more likely to obtain it?
Maybe the real lesson here is simpler than all that. Maybe we all need to take siestas. They feel good, and guess what? When you wake up, you have more energy for what comes next.
I really like your observation of calm as a ‘marketable state’. For me it’s become another cog in the massive Wellness Industry machine which actually causes people to feel guilty or inadequate about their stressful, chaotic lives.. another thing people need to ‘be’.
As a part time yoga teacher I do think calmness can be developed as a tool, a way to approach to situations, a perspective preferable to anger. But it isn’t a permanent state, a thing to purchase or win.
Thanks for your writing x