“As we practice yoga and begin to meditate, we develop equanimity. We let go of this ego. We realize that most of life is not personal.”
I read this passage in B.K.S. Iyengar’s Light on Life a few years ago and have always found it both helpful and troublesome. Iyengar uses the example of typical driving conditions in India—streets jammed with drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists and animals trying to get where they’re going—to point out how life is full of moments that don’t have be taken personally. “…our culture reminds us that sometimes life is impersonal. We all are subject to impersonal forces—like traffic.”
When I first read this I thought, OK, so there’s a tool for those days when someone or something irks you. Just remember that life is full of impersonal moments that we don’t have to take personally. It’s not about me; it’s just something that happened.
So much easier said than done, when for example, a driver is being courteous enough to hurriedly wave you through a cross walk, or the person in front of you in the express check out lane has interpreted the 15-item limit to include multiple incidence of 15 broad categories of items—fruits, things you store under the sink in the bathroom, processed snack foods containing high fructose corn syrup…
I’ve always wondered if there wasn’t something else about the little things in life that makes us so susceptible to frustration, anger, anxiety, or hurt. Why can’t I just develop equanimity, damn it?
And then I read this blog’s namesake book, and learned about something that Daniel Gilbert calls the “psychological immune system” and the intensity trigger.
According to Gilbert, our psychological defenses are like a military defense system that is triggered by large threats rather than small ones. A system that is prepared for every small hazard, say with travel bans, electrified borders, and constant surveillance, would be costly and impractical. So there has to be some minimum threshold that triggers a defensive reaction. The big threats get the big guns, but little ones might slip by, unnoticed (until, of course, they hit their target).
Our psychological immune system is like this. “Failed marriages and lost jobs are the kinds of large-scale assaults on our happiness that trigger our psychological defenses, but these defenses are not triggered by broken pencils, stubbed toes, or slow elevators…Intense suffering triggers the very processes that eradicate it, while mild suffering does not, and this counterintuitive fact can make it difficult for us to predict our emotional futures.”
Our brains are designed to help us recover and develop resilience after major losses, catastrophic events, and hardships. But we’re on our own when it comes to not strangling the loud know-it-all who catches the typo in our report.
So where does that leave us? Maybe in addition to telling ourselves “it’s not personal,” we can add “small threat—no missiles necessary” to our daily mantras. We can also try asking ourselves what is the rasa, or essential flavor of what we’re feeling at a particular moment (anger? disgust? fear?), and how that is affecting our response. Maybe we can even try to limit the amount of anger or disgust in our daily diet. More about that later…
