People have gone to great lengths to achieve the elusive state of being called calmness. They’ve surrendered, medicated, denied, avoided, distracted and withdrawn themselves to death, trying desperately to wrap their hands and heads around what appears to be a fleeting experience.

Calmness, like happiness, cannot be pasted on from the outside. It must emerge from the inside-out for it to be genuine and lasting. You cannot get it, in fact, you must open the tap within yourself, so that it can flow from its source deep within you. Most people end up struggling with the world around them in one way or another and in so doing develop unconscious and sticky habits of reaction that produce a nearly constant state of inner agitation.

Calmness refracts through your inner sea of glass into the world around you. If that great sea within and about you is choppy and uncertain, so too will be your expression. Whenever your heart is troubled and or your mind is inflexible and colored by prejudice, wisdom, perspective, vision and your sense of timing will not, cannot and thankfully do not come to your assistance. You are rendered impotent by agitation.

Here is what editor and essayist William George Jordan had to say on the matter…

“Calmness comes ever from within. It is the peace and restfulness of the depths of our nature. The fury of storm and of wind agitate only the surface of the sea; they can penetrate only two or three hundred feet,–below that is the calm, unruffled deep. To be ready for the great crises of life we must learn serenity in our daily living. Calmness is the crown of self-control.

When the worries and cares of the day fret you, and begin to wear upon you, and you chafe under the friction,–be calm. Stop, rest for a moment, and let calmness and peace assert themselves. If you let these irritating outside influences get the better of you, you are confessing your inferiority to them, by permitting them to dominate you. Study the disturbing elements, each by itself, bring all the will power of your nature to bear upon them, and you will find that they will, one by one, melt into nothingness, like vapors fading before the sun. The glow of calmness that will then pervade your mind, the tingling sensation of an inflow of new strength, may be to you the beginning of the revelation of the supreme calmness that is possible for you. Then, in some great hour of your life, when you stand face to face with some awful trial, when the structure of your ambition and life-work crumbles in a moment, you will be brave. You can then fold your arms calmly, look out undismayed and undaunted upon the ashes of your hope, upon the wreck of what you have faithfully built, and with brave heart and unfaltering voice you may say: ‘So let it be,–I will build again.'”

Take care to keep your crown of self-control fastened firmly upon your head. Those uninitiated in the alchemy of calmness tend to allow themselves to become upset at the drop of a dime and they are hard to miss. They wave their crowns violently in the faces of those people and circumstances that stand in the way of their goals and desires. Some even go to the extent of throwing their crowns when the world begins to wear on them, yet in so doing they relinquish the most important weapon in their arsenal: calmness.

Practice in the little things, that you may be ready for the large. You must be deliberate for man has come to accept a virtually uninterrupted experience of agitation and can hardly imagine the still yet powerful state of being known as calmness.

“Study the disturbing elements, each by itself, bring all the will power of your nature to bear upon them, and you will find that they will, one by one, melt into nothingness, like vapors fading before the sun.”