تفسیر درس

Equanimity – Commentary

Hello, this is AJ, welcome to the commentary for this months’ lesson, equanimity, equanimity.

Now in the main lesson we talked about equanimity and not being too attached to results, that this idea of equanimity is kind of the flip side, the other side of passion. It complements passion, all of these good ideas.

Then we have, in the interactive lessons, a somewhat challenging essay from Alan Watts and the main point of Alan Watts essay is that, too much seriousness makes us miserable and that it’s unwise, and that what we need is a more playful attitude.

So how are these connected? Well, I think that playfulness is sort of the key to equanimity.

Right, because it’s very hard for us to say I will not be attached to the results. I will not be attached to the results. I will choose a goal, but I’m not going to worry about it too much and that’s a hard thing to do actually, psychologically it’s not easy. Let’s say you have a goal to make more money and you have good reasons for it. You want to take care of yourself. You want to have more freedom. You want to take care of your family. These are all good things and it’s a perfectly fine goal to have.

And maybe in your life you’re really suffering because you don’t have enough money, so then that goal will start to feel very, very serious. You will become very, very attached to that goal, and this is where the trouble happens. It’s fine to be excited about that goal and to think about all the great things that’ll happen when you make more money. That’s a good thing to do, it can help motivate you for the goal. It’s even better to get out there and work hard to achieve your goal, but if you’re too serious about it, right. If you hold onto that thing too much you get too serious about achieving the result, about success, or too serious about being sad if you fail, that’s when you become miserable. That’s when you start to destroy your happiness, and then it doesn’t matter if you succeed or fail, you’re still going to be unhappy.

It’s that holding on too much that makes us miserable. And that essentially comes from being too, too serious. So many people do this. You know, I think about my own life and I look around at other people and see how they make themselves miserable by being so serious, by being too attached to the results in their life, too serious about the results. I’ll give you some examples.

During most of my youth I was very, very poor. I graduated from undergraduate school, from college and then I got out and couldn’t find any jobs that I wanted or liked. I ended up working as a security guard for several years and I made very little money, it was only a part-time job I was super, super, super poor. I made less money than a lot of people who are on welfare, who get money from the government. And yet, during that whole time I never thought of myself as a poor person. I never identified with this result, with this position in life. I never described myself as a poor person. I never described myself as being in poverty. And I never thought of myself in that way. It wasn’t my identity, I didn’t attach to it.

I didn’t enjoy it a lot of times. I didn’t enjoy not having money and it kind of sucked, it wasn’t great in many ways. But I wasn’t super miserable because, like I said, I just never took it too seriously. Now then later I went back to school, changed careers… I guess security guards not much of a career… but anyway I went and became a social workers. Now, as a social worker I made a little more money, not a lot of money, social workers don’t get rich usually. But I made enough to have a small little apartment and a decent life. I even made enough to save some money for travel sometimes, especially because I live so simply. I don’t know, I suppose I was like lower middle-class at that point. I don’t even know how to describe it, I didn’t care. I wasn’t attached to the result. I kind of had equanimity about it.

I mean, I was happy to have more money and more flexibility and more freedom to do things, but it wasn’t part of my identity, I am a social worker now that’s who I am. And so therefore, it’s quite easy for me to change careers again and become an English teacher. I just started doing it, in order to travel. Then I found that I enjoyed it and loved it. But again, I didn’t make tons of money, teachers also usually don’t make a lot of money. So I enjoyed that career and during that career I had ups and downs. I had some jobs that I really loved and I had some jobs that I really, really hated.

But, you know, I kind of just let them come and go. The good jobs I enjoyed as much as I could and I saved money, but then even the good jobs, I got bored with them eventually and I left. And then the bad jobs, I suffered through them. If they were really terrible I just quit them very quickly and went and got something else, I didn’t stay too attached to them.

And then finally I started Effortless English and it became a huge success and I made lots of money, and even though I made lots of money and have lots of money, I never thought of myself, identified myself with the money. So I never described myself as, I am a rich person, now I am rich, and I am a rich person that’s my identity now. And so, I just never went out and bought an expensive car, never bought an expensive house. Still don’t have a car at all and live in a pretty small simple apartment. Because it’s not my identity, I don’t take it too seriously; therefore, I’m not so afraid of losing it.

If for some reason Effortless English failed tomorrow, well, then I would just go do something else. So I don’t have all that fear in me about, oh my God. And I also don’t feel all this seriousness about pretending to be a certain kind of person. I don’t feel the need to try to dress a certain way, and look a certain way, act a certain way. I don’t feel the need to buy a bunch of stuff that makes me look important. Look at the rich, the big expensive car I have and look at all these expensive clothes, I just don’t do it.

I’m not too attached to it. I have a good amount, a healthy amount of equanimity in that area of my life, and because of that I’m quite happy about it. I’m happy. So all through these ups and downs from being super, super poor, to being kind of low middle-class, to having a good amount of money. You know, I was able to just keep that equanimity and therefore, I was happy because I identified with other things in my life. I identified with just being a human being and wanting to live an interesting life and wanting to learn and explore. So I did that when I was really poor. I did that when I was sort of middle-class. I still do it now that I have more money.

So you can see that I had goals, of course. I was poor, super poor and I had the goal of making more money. I mean, I had to decide that I wanted to go and become a social worker and become a teacher, and the goal to start the business and it took a lot of work to do each of those things. But I also had a healthy amount of equanimity and I think that’s why I was able to be successful and happy doing those things. So that’s the idea. I think the other way to look at it is, is that I just was and am playful about it. I just never was too, too serious about these things. I’m not too serious about my success now. I don’t think it means I’m some super important person, so I don’t take it seriously, I don’t take myself too seriously about it.

Often, when I travel, I meet members, Effortless English members. Sometimes they’re quite surprised, because I seem really, really relaxed and casual. I almost never dress nicely, I wear very casual clothes. I only wear… you guys see me in suits sometimes in the videos or in nice shirts, but I only do that when I’m doing a video or speaking on a stage, and I do that because it helps with the audience to respect my message. So you’ll see that, in my kind of official things, but if you meet me anywhere else, like right now I’m wearing shorts. You’ll see me usually in shorts and a t-shirt if it’s warm or something like that.

So, this actually helps with life, because having that playful spirit that’s what gives you the equanimity to view it as, all of it as kind of a game. Yeah, in a game of course you have goals.

If you’re playing basketball your goal is to put the ball into the hoop. If you’re on the team, of course, your goal is to win, but in the end it’s a game and unless you’re in the NBA and it’s your job and you’re making money, it doesn’t really matter if you win or lose in the end. In the end you can just laugh about it. You had a good time playing basketball with your friends. So, while you’re in the game, you have the goal of winning, of performing well, but yet at exactly the same time at a deeper level you realize it’s just a game and that the deepest goal of all is to enjoy it and enjoy your friends.

And when it’s all over, if you win, maybe you feel kind of good… oh we won today yay… and if you lose maybe you feel a little disappointed… oh man, lost the game today… but either way, not too serious, it’s a game.

Well this is just such a powerful attitude to have in all parts of life and I know it’s tough sometimes, we’re trained to be so damn serious, especially when money’s involved, right?

Some people can be quite playful in certain part of their life, maybe with their children, for example, but oh, when it comes to work, when it comes to the job everything becomes deadly serious and therefore, much more stressful and miserable.

But, if you can view your job, your career in the same way as playing basketball with your friends or playing a board game with your kids, then life just becomes so much more easy and fun. And again, the funny thing is, you relax when you do that and therefore, you perform better, you actually have a better chance of achieving your goals. By being focused and yet playful, that’s sort of the perfect sweet spot we call it. The sweet spot is that perfect point in the middle where everything works great. Right, so that sweet spot is that, yeah, on one hand you’re working hard to achieve a certain goal, but on the other hand you have this spirit of playfulness where none of its too serious. So you win, you lose, eh, in the end it doesn’t matter it’s just a game.

You get fired from your job, eh, don’t worry you’ll get another one. This was always my attitude with working and I don’t know, I used to just… I could never understand people who were so damn serious about jobs, because in my mind it’s like, well, I can always get a job. As long as I kept my expenses low, if I didn’t try to live in a big house and get an expensive car it didn’t matter. I lived a simple life. I knew I could always go get a job. If I had to I’d go down and work at McDonald’s. It wouldn’t be fun, it’s not something I wanted to do but I knew I could do it, I wouldn’t starve to death I knew that. And I knew eventually, after, if I had to work at McDonald’s eventually I’d make a little money and I’d keep looking and I’d eventually find a better job than that.

But I knew I could always figure it out, I could always find a way to keep going, to survive and eventually improve the situation.

That allowed me to play with my career more and because I played with my career, I eventually did discover what I love, love, love to do and started a business and was very, very, very successful with the business and still am. If I’d been super serious about it I probably would’ve just, I don’t know what, I might still be a security guard today. I’m going to be a security guard and I’m serious about it or maybe social workers, that was my first maybe real career. Well, if I’d been too serious about being a social worker I might still be one.

Nothing wrong with being a social worker, but in the end it wasn’t for me. But some people will just stay with something that they don’t even like anymore. Maybe they liked it in the beginning, but they’ll continue doing it even when they hate it, because they’re too serious, they’re too serious about their position in life. They can’t imagine moving to a smaller house.

They can’t imagine selling their new car and getting an old used one. There’s too much seriousness and dignity involved, and so they become prisoners.

And we can do this in all different parts of life. I’m using work as an example, because it’s so common, because it’s probably the most common area where we get trapped by too much seriousness.

So equanimity, what I want you to do this month is to still focus on some goals, some important goals. I don’t know, identify your top two goals in life right now, the two goals most important to you I life. Now, because they’re important, on one hand they’re going to feel serious.

The second thing I want you to do is look at those two goals, decide how you’re going to achieve them and take action to achieve them, but part two, the most important part, is I want you to view them in a playful way. Ask yourself, how can I achieve these goals playfully? How can I playfully accept success or failure? And, of course, especially failure.

So you have the two goals, you’re serious about them in one way, but on the other hand I want you to look at that and really think about failing. Really think about, what if I don’t achieve the goals? What if I fail? How am I still going to be playful about it? How am I going to laugh about failing and be playful and not be too sad about it? That’s a good thing to do. Any time you set goals it’s really great, you guys know the secret. It’s great to imagine achieving the goal and to imagine all the wonderful benefits and to get excited about it, that’s one side that’s important.

But the other side, it’s also important, is to imagine failing. All those visualization people, the secret people they might say oh that’s terrible don’t do it, but they’re wrong. You should do it.

Think about failing. Imagine that side too and when you think about failing think and ask yourself, okay, I imagine I fail I don’t achieve this. And then think, how can I still be happy anyway? How can I laugh about it? How can I still just shrug my shoulders and let go of it and

still be happy in my life? That’s also important to think about, and when you can really answer that question and really visualize, that’s when you’ll relax and you’ll see the whole thing as more playful, and paradoxically you actually will have a better chance of succeeding then.

All right, get out there and do it. I’ll see you next time. Bye for now.