Calmness

Recently I have been rethinking the concept of calmness. I have often pushed it away in my life because I thought of it as a passive state and I feel comfortable being active. I like the hectic life. I feel it gives value to the things I do. I enjoy doing a thousand things in a day and arriving tired but happy in the evening - it's been a long time since I've felt that way, now that I think about it. Lately, however, I have started to think of calmness as an active state: a quest for focus and self-care. It seems to me that calmness does not have to be a state of inactivity but a state of attention: you can read a book calmly, you can study calmly or you can find calmness while running in the freezing air. Over the past few days, I have stopped to think about what really makes me feel good and I found that calmness was the common thread among all the small things. Taking my time to eat breakfast - in the sense of preparing it, sitting down, and eating without rushing - makes me feel good. Practicing Yoga where the movements are slow but strenuous gives me a sense of calmness that lulls me more than a jumped, fast-paced workout. I have always thought of self-care as a waste of time: why take a bath if you can take a shower? Why waste your time cooking if there are so many things already prepared? The answer I give to myself now is that this sense of rush ends up eating you inside. You try doing everything in a hurry, for what? To ultimately waste time on unimportant things without even realising it? I want to try to pay more attention to myself and calmly ask myself what I really need. And when that sense of rush sets in, I want to ask myself if it is really necessary.

Haste
When I am in a hurry, I often feel immobilised, especially when I perceive judgment. If I have to do simple actions like tying my shoes in a hurry or opening the door of the house in a hurry and I sense the presence of people watching me, it is as if my hands stop working. While I move I anticipate that the person I’m with will get irritated by how long it is taking me to do something. I can already hear their voice in my head saying "come on, you’re so slow, we are late" or "wake up, you can't even open a door!”. The longer I wait for their voice, the more I freeze and when/if these words come, they only increase my state of anxiety to the point in which my mind goes blank, everything shuts down, and I cannot even remember what I’m doing. Instead, in those moments I would like to remind myself that I am not underwater, that I can breathe and that these are simple actions that I do every day. Once, a person I know, seeing me in this state of confusion, told me 'calm down, rushing only kills rationality’. These words immediately relaxed me, giving me a sense of calmness and warmth. They made me think that I have often surrounded myself with people who constantly live their life with haste. The anxiety created by their own rush is transformed into irritability towards anyone or anything that prevents them from moving as quickly as possible. That day I realised that I want to seek that state of calmness not only in the things I do but also in the people I surround myself with, to ultimately find it within myself.