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Areas › Anger › Equanimity and perspective
Most of us treat confusion as a gap to be closed fast, and anger is one of the quickest ways to close it: decide they meant it, decide what it says about you, act. Curiosity holds the same gap open a little longer. Practise on small things, like a message whose tone you cannot read, so the move is familiar when something bigger arrives.
No soul knows what it will reap tomorrow (Quran 31:34). Not knowing is the ordinary human condition here, not a fault to be fixed in a hurry.
لقمان
إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ عِندَهُۥ عِلۡمُ ٱلسَّاعَةِ وَيُنَزِّلُ ٱلۡغَيۡثَ وَيَعۡلَمُ مَا فِي ٱلۡأَرۡحَامِۖ وَمَا تَدۡرِي نَفۡسࣱ مَّاذَا تَكۡسِبُ غَدࣰ اۖ وَمَا تَدۡرِي نَفۡسُۢ بِأَيِّ أَرۡضࣲ تَمُوتُۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ عَلِيمٌ خَبِيرُۢ
Knowledge of the Hour [of Resurrection] belongs to God; it is He who sends down the relieving rain and He who knows what is hidden in the womb. No soul knows what it will reap tomorrow, and no soul knows in what land it will die; it is God who is all knowing and all aware
Qur’an 31:34read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A pilot randomised study adapted mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for people who are highly reactive to stress and found it acceptable and promising against an online self-help comparison. The sample was small, so this is an early signal about training a different relationship to discomfort rather than an established result. Nothing in it tests whether confusion can be enjoyed.
Armstrong L, Rimes KA. (2016). Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Neuroticism (Stress Vulnerability): A Pilot Randomized Study.. Behavior therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Curiosity and threat pull in opposite directions, so leaning into one softens the other.
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.
Sitting practice teaches four useful things about anger: everything passes, the senses are calmer ground than the story, you do not have to attend to every thought, and you are not the words you use about yourself.
Some drawings can be seen two ways, an old woman or a young one, and neither reading is the correct one. Feeling the switch happen in your own eyes teaches something no explanation manages.