Equanimity Over Positivity

October 2020 

There are books that change with time. Not in their content, of course, the words are fixed, unmoved, but in the light by which we read them. Once, I believed a book, once read, had surrendered all it could offer. But years passed, and life, a few cities, a few betrayals, a few grey winters, proved otherwise. Now, when I return to certain titles, I do so not to reencounter the book, but to meet the ghost of a former self. Someone more eager. Less watchful.

I was 21, fresh from engineering school, newly assigned to TCS and sent to Trivandrum. The dormitory had the feel of something makeshift, halfway between a hostel and a motel. On a bedside shelf I found a thin paperback, Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse. I read it in one sitting, and missed my class the next day. It struck me then as poetic, remote, a little too spiritual for my unscarred pragmatism.

Years later, in a student kitchen in the French Alps, the same book returned like a letter long delayed. Later still, in a cold German town, it sat on my nightstand like a silent companion. It hadn’t changed. But I had. What once felt distant now read like a confession. A man’s quiet crisis. A search that stripped rather than added. The erudition, Upanishads, Schopenhauer, the Gita, was only background noise. The real current ran elsewhere. Beneath the sentences. Beneath the man.

Siddhartha is not a novel, really. It is a journey. Not outward, but inward, one that refuses resolution. Siddhartha discards teachings, renounces even the Buddha. Because truth, it turns out, cannot be borrowed. It must be earned, or suffered. “Knowledge can be communicated,” Hesse writes, “but not wisdom.” A line I once underlined absently. Now it lingers like the aftertaste of an old regret.

We live in a time obsessed with happiness. With productivity. With the relentless evangelism of optimism. Entire industries flourish on the promise of positivity. But one wonders: what lies beneath the smile? Positive thinking, for all its slogans, is still thinking. Still effort. Still grasping. Another idea dressed in softer clothes. Not freedom, but a more acceptable prison.

Equanimity, now that is something else. It does not glisten. It does not strive. It sits. Unmoved. It is the still point in a storm, not because it defeats the storm, but because it no longer fears it. Equanimity cannot be achieved. It is found, sometimes, when everything else is stripped away. It cannot be chased. Only received.

Siddhartha, at one point in his wandering, is questioned by a merchant who doubts his usefulness. What can he do? he is asked. Siddhartha replies, quietly: “I can think. I can wait. I can fast.” The merchant scoffs. But each answer is a small revolution.

To think, not compulsively, but clearly. In silence. As if thought were a tool, not a burden. In a world that reacts before it reflects, that alone is defiance.

To wait, without agitation. Without fear that life will pass one by. To wait because haste distorts. Because some answers arrive only when summoned by silence.

And to fast, not merely from food, but from need. From outcomes. From applause. To fast is to say: I am not dependent. Not owned by the world. If I must go without, I will not flinch.

The merchant asks, what use is fasting? Siddhartha replies, “If a man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do.” This is not asceticism. It is a refusal to panic. A calm that wealth cannot buy.

In these three declarations, thinking, waiting, fasting, there is no rebellion, no sermon. Only the quiet sovereignty of a man who has stopped pretending. They are not strategies. They are states. And they ask nothing of the world.

Equanimity, then, is not victory over suffering. It is presence within it. It does not conquer desire; it observes it, unmoved. And when desire no longer commands, what remains is not lack, but peace. Not the glittering kind. The still kind.

Siddhartha does not become a monk. Nor a king. He becomes a man who no longer seeks to become anything. That, perhaps, is the destination.

And so, when I reread that slim novel, I no longer rush. I do not underline. I read as one might watch a river, knowing the water is not the same, but the current, somehow, always is.