Amy and I have coffee for about 30 minutes every morning. It’s been one of the wonderful positive side effects of the Covid crisis.
Some days we land on a topic. Other days we don’t. Today, after a few minutes, the question “What is your worldview?” popped up, and we bashed that around for a little while.
The last year has had an enormous impact on my personal worldview. My underlying value system and beliefs haven’t changed, but I’ve reconsidered, rethought, adjusted, and modified many external perspectives. But that’s the easy stuff.
Amy said something this morning that caused me to jump out of my skin with delight.
“You have always been the weird kid in the corner with a big book.”
At the moment she said this, we were discussing how we understood others and how others understood or misunderstood us.
My internal perspective is unchanged, but in the last year, it has surfaced much more clearly. About four years ago, Jerry Colonna and I had a conversation described in his book Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up where I said, “I’m no longer striving.”
I didn’t completely understand what I meant by this back then, but it was the beginning of me bending the arc on my internal worldview. Jerry linked it to equanimity, which has deep roots in Buddhist thought in addition to its traditional definition.
In Buddhism, equanimity (Pali: upekkhā; Sanskrit: upekṣā) is one of the four sublime attitudes and is considered: Neither a thought nor an emotion, it is rather the steady conscious realization of reality’s transience. It is the ground for wisdom and freedom and the protector of compassion and love.
I’ve anchored on the phrase the steady conscious realization of reality’s transience which speaks to me and feels reflective of my current internal worldview.