The Best State Of Life Is Not Being In Love, It’s Being Calm

Over time, we usually discover that the best state of life is not to be in love, but to be calm. Only when a person manages to achieve that inner balance where nothing is left and nothing is missing does he feel fuller than ever. So love can even appear, if that’s what you want, although it’s not an obligatory necessity.

It’s curious how most people still have as their main goal to find the perfect partner. We have more and more apps on our mobile phones to facilitate these searches. There is also no lack of classic prime-time television programs aimed at the same purpose. We search and search this vast ocean without having made an essential journey before: that of self-knowledge.

The fact that we have not made this necessary pilgrimage through our interior to investigate emptiness and needs makes us sometimes end up choosing the wrong travel companions. The ephemeral relationships that end up inscribed in the solitude of our pillows, so full of broken dreams and smothered tears. So much so that there are many people who spend a large part of their life cycle jumping from stone to stone, from heart to heart, storing disappointments, bitterness and sad disappointments.

In the midst of this scenario, as Graham Greene said in his novel  “Affair” , we only have two options: look back or look forward. If we walk hand in hand with experience and wisdom, we will take the right path: the interior. That’s when we must sort out the labyrinth of our emotions to find that precious balance.

The best state of life is to be calm

Tranquility does not mean an absence of emotions. Nor is it about giving up any love or that passion that dignifies us, that which gives us wings and roots. The calm person does not avoid any of these dimensions, but sees them from that perspective where he knows very well where the limits are, where this moderation lights up our inner peace, like a beacon in a dark night.

We live in a mass culture that imposes that we must look for a partner, as if that way we could finally reach the much desired self-fulfillment. Phrases like  “when you have a girlfriend you will calm down”  or  “all your problems will be solved when you find your ideal man”  do nothing but constantly nullify our identity to build an absolutist and erroneous idealization of love.

The best state of being human is not to love until it is annulled. It’s not giving it all away until our rights in life are attenuated just because of this unfathomable fear of being alone. The best state is to be calm, with an adequate inner harmony, where there is no room for emptiness, desperate attachments or impossible idealizations.

Because  love, no matter how much they tell us, doesn’t always justify everything. It doesn’t mean we have to abandon ourselves.

How to achieve inner tranquility

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once said that the field of consciousness is limited: it only accepts one problem at a time. This sentence contains an evident reality. People accumulate in their minds a multitude of problems, goals, needs and desires. The curious thing about all this is that  some people come to believe that love solves everything, that it is this multipurpose balm that solves everything, that orders everything.

However, before we launch ourselves into the void hoping to get lucky in love, it’s best to take it slow. The first thing to do will be to reach that calm, that inner tranquility where we can rearrange our personal puzzles to gain strength and temperance. Let us now reflect on a series of dimensions that can help us achieve this goal.

Keys to achieving inner balance

Believe it or not, at some point in our life cycle, this moment will always come. That moment when we are going to say to ourselves “I wish calm, I want to find my inner balance” to be calm. It is an exceptional way to promote our personal growth, and to achieve it, nothing better than promoting these changes.

• The first thing we’ll do is learn to  differentiate which of the relationships we currently have aren’t satisfying. No one will be able to achieve this tranquility so longed for if they rely on a harmful link between family, friendship or work ties.

• The second step is to make an essential decision: stop being the victim. In a way, we are all in some way: victims of those harmful bonds mentioned above, victims of our insecurities, our obsessions or limitations. We have to be able to reprogram our attitudes to nurture the courage and tear down all those fences.

• Once the previous two steps are achieved, it is necessary to reach a wonderful third step. We must have a purpose, a clear and definite determination: to be happy. We have to cultivate that simple happiness in which the person finally feels good about who he is, about what he has and what he has achieved. This complacency nurtured by the roots of self-love will undoubtedly bring us great balance.

People whose balance breathes in the heart and whose tranquility dwells in the mind do not see love as a need or a desperate desire. Love is not something that comes to rescue them, because the calm person no longer needs to be saved. Love is a precious treasure that a person finds and decides, out of freedom and of their own will, to care for it as the most beautiful dimension of the human being.

Images courtesy of Francine Van Hove