Calm

Alain de Botton

• Publisher: The School of Life
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780993538773
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

A guide to finding serenity by engaging with our thoughts. Meditation teaches us to distance ourselves from our thoughts. The School of Life teaches us to engage with them. Rather than practicing slow breathing or drinking special teas, we can reach a state of calm by thinking. This persuasive and humorous book argues that the most powerful tool we have is the ability to remain calm.By getting at the roots of our greatest frustrations and anxieties, Calm provides us with the essential tools we need in order to defend ourselves against panic and anger.

• A NEW APPROACH TO MINDFULNESS: from The School of Life.
• AN ENCOURAGING GUIDE TO MANAGING OUR EMOTIONS
• PRACTICAL LIFE SKILLS: for how to find-and remain-calm.
• PART OF THE SCHOOL OF LIFE LIBRARY SERIES: other titles include Small Pleasures, Relationships, and Great Thinkers.

Chapter One:

Relationships

i. Romantic Expectations

The central fantasy behind all the noise and anguish of relationships is to find someone we can be happy with. It sounds almost laughable, given what tends to happen.

We dream of someone who will understand us, with whom we can share our longings and our secrets, with whom we can be weak, playful, relaxed and properly ourselves.

Then the horror begins. We come across it second-hand when we hear the couple yelling at one another through the wall of the hotel room as we brush our teeth; when we see the sullen pair at the table across the restaurant; and sometimes, of course, when turmoil descends upon our own unions.

Nowhere do we tend to misbehave more gravely than in our relationships. We become in them people that our friends could hardly recognise. We discover a shocking capacity for distress and anger. We turn cold or get furious and slam doors. We swear and say wounding things. We bring enormously high hopes to our relationships – but in practice, these relationships often feel as if they have been especially designed to maximise distress.

Our lives are powerfully affected by a special quirk of the human mind to which we rarely pay much attention. We are creatures deeply marked by our expectations. We go around with mental pictures, lodged in our brains, of how things are supposed to go. We may hardly even notice we’ve got such phantasms. But expectations have an enormous impact on how we respond to what happens to us. They are always framing the way we interpret the events in our lives. It’s according to the tenor of our expectations that we will deem moments in our lives to be either enchanting or (more likely) profoundly mediocre and unfair.

What drives us to fury are affronts to our expectations. There are plenty of things that don’t turn out as we’d like but don’t make us livid either. It would be great if it could be sunny over the Easter break, but we have learned across long years that we live in a cloudy, generally damp, disappointing climate, so we won’t stamp our feet when we realise it is drizzling. When a problem has been factored into our expectations, calm is never endangered. We may be sad, but we aren’t screaming. Yet when you can’t find the car keys (they’re always by the door, in the little drawer beneath the gloves), the reaction may be very different. Here, an expectation has been violated. Someone must have taken the damn keys on purpose. We were going to be on time, now we’ll be late. This is a catastrophe. You are enraged because, somewhere in your mind, you have a perilous faith in a world in which car keys simply never go astray. Every one of our hopes, so innocently and mysteriously formed, opens us up to a vast terrain of suffering.

Our expectations are never higher, and therefore more troubling, than they are in love. There are reckless ideas circulating in our societies about what sharing a life with another person might be like. Of course, we see relationship difficulties around us all the time; there’s a high frequency of splitting, separation and divorce, and our own past experience is bound to be pretty mixed. But we have a remarkable capacity to discount this information. We retain highly ambitious ideas of what relationships are meant to be and what they will (eventually) be like for us – even if we have, in fact, never seen such relationships in action anywhere near us.

We’ll be lucky; we can just feel it intuitively. Eventually, we’ll find that creature we know exists: the ‘right person’; we’ll understand each other very well, we’ll like doing everything together, and we’ll experience deep mutual devotion and loyalty. They will, at last, be on our side.

We aren’t dreaming. We’re just remembering. The idea of a good relationship isn’t coming from what we’ve seen in adulthood. It’s coming from a stronger, more powerful source. The idea of happy coupledom taps into a fundamental picture of comfort, deep security, wordless communication and of our needs being effortlessly understood and met. It’s coming from early childhood. Psychoanalysts suggest that we all knew the state of love in the womb and in early infancy when, at the best moments, a loving parent did in fact engage with us in the way we hope a lover may. They knew when we were hungry or tired, even though we couldn’t explain. We did not need to strive. They could make us feel completely safe. We were held peacefully. We are projecting a memory onto the future; we are anticipating what may happen from what once occurred according to a now-impossible template.

We have always had dreams of happy love. Only recently in history have we imagined that they might come to fruition within a marriage. An 18th-century French aristocrat would – for instance – take it for granted that marriage was a necessary matter for reproduction, property and social alliances. There was no expectation that it would, on top of it all, also lead to happiness with a spouse. That was reserved for affairs – the real targets of tender and complex emotional hopes. The practical sides of a relationship and the romantic longing for closeness and communion were kept on separate planes. Only very recently has the emotional idealism of the love affair come to be seen as possible, even necessary, within marriage. We expect, of course, that there will be major pragmatic dimensions to our unions, involving variable mortgage rates and children’s car seats. But, at the same time, we expect that the relationship will fulfil all our longings for deep understanding and tenderness.

Our expectations make things very difficult.

The expectations might go like this: a decent partner should easily, intuitively, understand what I’m concerned about. I shouldn’t have to explain things at length to them. If I’ve had a difficult day, I shouldn’t have to say that I’m worn out and need a bit of space. They should be able to tell how I’m feeling. They shouldn’t oppose me: if I point out that one of our acquaintances is a bit stuck up, they shouldn’t start defending them. They’re meant to be constantly supportive. When I feel bad about myself, they should shore me up, remind me of my strengths. A decent partner won’t make too many demands. They won’t be constantly requesting that I do things to help them out, or dragging me off to do something I don’t like. We’ll always like the same things. I tend to have pretty good taste in films, food and household routines: they’ll understand and sympathise with them at once.

Strangely, even when we’ve had pretty disappointing experiences, we don’t lose faith in our expectations. Hope reliably triumphs over experience. It’s always very tempting to console ourselves with an apparently very reasonable thought: the reason it didn’t work out this time was not that the expectations were too high, but that we were trying to get together with the wrong person. We weren’t compatible enough. So rather than adjust our ideas of what relationships are meant to be like, we shift our hopes to a new target, another person on whom we can direct the same insanely elevated hopes.

At dark points in relationships, it can be almost impossible to believe that the problem lies with relationships in general, for the issues are so clearly focused in on the particular person we happen to be with – their tendency not to listen to us, to be too cold, to be cloyingly present … But this isn’t the problem of love. It’s them. It wouldn’t be like this with another person, the one we saw at the conference. They looked nice and we had a brief chat about the theme of the keynote speaker. Partly because of the slope of their neck and a lilt in their accent, we reached an overwhelming conclusion: with them it would be easier. There could be a better life waiting round the corner.

What we say to our partners is often quite grotesque. We turn to someone we’ve left everything to in our will and agreed to share our income with for the rest of our lives – and tell them the very worst things we can think of: things we’d never dream of saying to anyone else. To pretty much everyone else, we are reliably civil. We’re always very nice to the people in the sandwich shop; we talk through problems reasonably with colleagues; we’re pretty much always in a good mood around friends. But then again, without anything uncivil being meant by this, we have very few expectations in these areas.

No one can disappoint and upset us as much as the person we’re in a relationship with – for of no one do we have higher hopes. It’s because we are so dangerously optimistic that we call them a cunt, a shithead or a weakling. The intensity of the disappointment and frustration is dependent on the prior massive investment of hope. It’s one of the odder gifts of love.

So a solution to our distress and agitation lies in a curious area: with a philosophy of pessimism. It’s a strange and unappealing thought. Pessimism sounds very unattractive. It’s associated with failure; it’s usually what gets in the way of better things. But when it comes to relationships, expectations are the enemies of love.

A more moderate, more reasonable, set of expectations around relationships would include the idea that it is normal and largely unavoidable that people do not understand one another very well in a couple. Each person’s character and mind is hugely complex and convoluted. It’s hard to grasp exactly why someone acts as they do. And, by extension, we’d be assuming from the start that no partner is going to have a complete, reliable or terribly accurate understanding of us. There will be the occasional things they get absolutely right, a few areas where they really grasp what’s going on in us; that’s what makes the early days so charming. But these will be exceptions, rather than standard. As a relationship developed, we then wouldn’t get hurt when our partner made some wildly inaccurate assumptions about our needs or preferences. We’d have been assuming that this would be coming along pretty soon – just as we don’t take it remotely amiss if an acquaintance recommends a film we detest: we know they couldn’t know. It doesn’t bother us at all. Our expectations are set to a reasonable level.

We’d ideally have an assumption that in any relationship there would be significant areas of disagreement – which could well turn out to be irresolvable. We wouldn’t particularly relish this. It’s not that we are eager to get together with someone with whom we are at odds. But we would just assume that we’re not going to find someone who is on the same wavelength as us on every serious issue that crops up. The idea would be that a good relationship would involve strong agreement on a few pretty major matters, with the expectation that in a host of other areas there would be sharply divergent attitudes and ideas. This divergence wouldn’t feel like a terrible climbdown or compromise. It would be normal, just as one would cheerfully work in an office alongside a person who had a totally different idea of what a nice holiday might be like or a bedtime unrelated to ours. We would know that a good working relationship would not mean blanket agreement. We’d be assuming that our partner would be quite often wrapped up in concerns of their own that wouldn’t really have much to do with us.

In a wiser world than our own, we would regularly remind ourselves of the various reasons why people simply cannot live up to the expectations that have come to be linked to romantic relationships.

One is dealing with another person

Much that will matter to us cannot possibly be in sync with another person. Why should another human being get tired at the same time as you, want to eat the same things, like the same songs, have the same aesthetic preferences, the same attitude to money or the same idea about Christmas? For babies, there is a long and strange set of discoveries about the real separate existence of the mother. At first it seems to the child that the mother is perfectly aligned with it. But gradually there’s a realisation that the mother is someone else: that she might be sad when the child is feeling jolly. Or tired when the child is ready to jump up and down on the bed for ten minutes. We have similarly basic discoveries to make of our partners. They are not extensions of us.

The early stages of love give a misleading image of what a relationship can be like

The experience of adult love starts with the joyful discovery of some amazing congruences. It’s wonderful to discover someone who finds the same jokes hilarious, who feels the same way as you about cosy jumpers or the music of Brazil, someone who is really able to see why you feel as you do about your father, or who deeply appreciates your confidence around form-filling or your knowledge of wine. There’s a seductive hope that the wonderful fit between the two of you is the first intimation of a general fusion of souls.

Love is the discovery of harmony in some very specific areas – but to continue with this expectation is to doom hope to a slow death. Every relationship will necessarily involve the discovery of a huge number of areas of divergence. It will feel as if you are growing apart and that the precious unity you knew during the weekend in Paris is being destroyed. But what is happening should really be seen under a much less alarming description: disagreement is what happens when love succeeds and you get to know someone close up across the full range of their life.

Everyone’s childhood was unbalanced

Any upbringing will be imperfect in important ways. The atmosphere of home might have been too strict or too lax, too focused on money or not adequately on top of the finances. It might have been emotionally smothering or a bit distant and detached. Family life might have been relentlessly gregarious or limited by lack of confidence. Getting from being a baby to a reasonably functional adult is never a flawless process. We are all, in diverse ways, damaged and insane. The child might have learned to keep its true thoughts and feelings very much to itself and to tread very carefully around fragile parents; and in later life, this person may still be rather secretive and cagey in their own relationships. The characteristic was acquired to deal with a childhood situation, but such patterns get deeply embedded and keep on going. Our adaptations to the troubles of our past make us all maddening prospects in the present.

The error we’re always tempted to make is to see defects as special to our own partner. We get to know the irritating and disappointing sides of one particular person – and draw the conclusion that we’ve been especially unlucky. We’ve become involved with someone who seems lovely on the surface but has revealed themselves to be strangely disturbed and defective. What a curse! What a problem to correct! We therefore look around for a new partner with whom we can finally have what we always knew was promised to us: a problem-free relationship. Our romantic impulses are continually renewed. We blame everything but our hopes.

And yet, the reasons why other people are disappointing are universal. The problems may take on a local character, but everyone would have them to a significant extent. We don’t need to know the specific eccentricities we would find in a prospective partner. But you can be sure there will be some – and that they will, at points, be pretty serious. The only people we can think of as satisfying are those we don’t yet know very well.

In many areas of culture and life, we can trace two major – and highly contrasting – attitudes, which can be summarised under the names ‘Romantic’ and ‘Classical’. The distinction was first used in connection with the arts, but it readily applies to the way we think and feel about relationships. Many of our current expectations about what relationships are meant to be like are deeply influenced by Romantic ideas. There are several points of contention between Classicism and Romanticism, including:

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Relationships
• Chapter Two: Other People
• Chapter Three: Work
• Chapter Four: The Sources of Calm
• Conclusion: The Quiet Life
• Copyright