Areas › Anger › Equanimity and perspective
Queueing, splitting a bill fairly, sharing a road with strangers: all of this is recent. We have had a few thousand years of practice at it, against a much longer history of living another way.
It helps to plan for the mismatch instead of being caught out by it every time. If crowds, traffic and open plan offices reliably wear you thin, build in more margin on those days: leave earlier, eat before you go, keep the difficult conversation for the evening.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Bear in mind that the present life is just a game, a diversion, an attraction, a cause of boasting among you, of rivalry in wealth and children (Quran 57:20). The rivalry is old news, and seeing it named makes the next small contest easier to decline.
ٱعۡلَمُوٓاْ أَنَّمَا ٱلۡحَيَوٰةُ ٱلدُّنۡيَا لَعِبࣱ وَلَهۡوࣱ وَزِينَةࣱ وَتَفَاخُرُۢ بَيۡنَكُمۡ وَتَكَاثُرࣱ فِي ٱلۡأَمۡوَٰلِ وَٱلۡأَوۡلَٰدِۖ كَمَثَلِ غَيۡثٍ أَعۡجَبَ ٱلۡكُفَّارَ نَبَاتُهُۥ ثُمَّ يَهِيجُ فَتَرَىٰهُ مُصۡفَرࣰّ ا ثُمَّ يَكُونُ حُطَٰمࣰ اۖ وَفِي ٱلۡأٓخِرَةِ عَذَابࣱ شَدِيدࣱ وَمَغۡفِرَةࣱ مِّنَ ٱللَّهِ وَرِضۡوَٰنࣱۚ وَمَا ٱلۡحَيَوٰةُ ٱلدُّنۡيَآ إِلَّا مَتَٰعُ ٱلۡغُرُورِ
Bear in mind that the present life is just a game, a diversion, an attraction, a cause of boasting among you, of rivalry in wealth and children. It is like plants that spring up after the rain: their growth at first delights the sowers, but then you see them wither away, turn yellow, and become stubble. There is terrible punishment in the next life as well as forgiveness and approval from God; the life of this world is only an illusory pleasure
Qur’an 57:20read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of mindfulness based stress reduction in people without a clinical diagnosis found moderate benefits for stress and related outcomes, smaller than the effects seen in clinical samples. Ordinary background pressure does shift with training, just less dramatically than the brochures suggest. That is the right scale to expect from a daily practice.
Khoury B, Sharma M, Rush SE, Fournier C. (2015). Mindfulness-based stress reduction for healthy individuals: A meta-analysis.. Journal of psychosomatic research doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Expecting the crowded moments to be hard makes them feel less like a personal insult when they are.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Light bounces off a face, lands at the back of your eye, and becomes a signal your brain assembles into a person. What you see is a reconstruction, a very good one, and never quite the thing itself.
You get one life, and spending the whole of it at war with how it turned out is a heavy price to pay for being right.
Old traditions worked this out a long time ago: someone who cannot be certain they are right cannot be righteously cruel. Doubt is not weakness here, it is what keeps the hand down.