Gina Elia | A Fragmented Peace

The Benjamin Franklin Experiment | Sounding Out the Role of Tranquility in Contemporary America

By Gina Elia 11/09/15 1:23am

“Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable,” says Benjamin Franklin on the virtue of tranquility. Today, many people agree with his sentiment. On Penn’s campus alone, a plethora of options exist for students who want to find time to calm down from the constant anxiety and pressure that build up within them from coursework and social interaction. Everyone has a different idea of what kinds of activities calm them — everything from the Penn Consciousness Club’s meditation meetings to weekly contemplative exercises held by campus religious groups to study breaks and film screenings. For some, energetic enterprises like creative writing, cooking, exercising and playing instruments are just as calming as meditation because the people who love them find them to be pleasurable experiences.

Regardless of the mode, though, there is no doubt that people at Penn and beyond value opportunities to relax and destress from the realities of their everyday lives. Without such forays into tranquil states of mind, life would likely turn into an unending war zone of emotional and intellectual frazzle.

Yet, rather than truly living in tranquility, we generally compartmentalize it into specific portions of our life. We schedule it into our days as though it is just another time commitment — one hour here for meditation group, another few hours here for a quick trip to the beach with friends and so on. Specific spaces exist in our lives where a tranquil state of mind is allowed, the boundaries of which we carefully regulate so as to ensure that we have plenty of time left over for typing away at our essays or answering our problem sets. The increased presence of smartphones in our world means that we can even bring the workspace into our relaxation time now, taking advantage of the few minutes when our friends go to the restroom to shoot off another few emails and return more phone calls.

Relying on meditation groups and study breaks as ways of becoming more tranquil barely scratches the surface of what that concept means. As a virtue, tranquility is not a time of day but a state of mind. Tranquility means walking into a midterm exam without losing peace of mind, or responding to the insensitive actions of others with an even voice and a level head. An ingrained sense of tranquility is an unnatural way of behaving for most of us and requires cultivation and perseverance to master.

Tranquility as a process of formation was the original goal of many strands of meditation from various religious traditions, notably Buddhism, from which the popular mindfulness movement derives many of its ideas. But rather than promoting a strict practice of sacrificing material and emotional comforts and distractions in order to develop an unshakeable sense of inner peace, contemporary American culture considers tranquility as something to treat ourselves with, in soundbites. The workaholic culture of Penn’s campus and the United States more generally portrays a certain level of stress and anxiety as a positive sign that we are being productive. Serious efforts to develop a sense of ongoing inner tranquility directly counter the notion that the level of stress we feel is directly related to how successful we are.

American society has generally demonstrated an increased awareness of the importance of making space for relaxation and quiet time in the past few decades, which is great. However, separated off as our tranquil spaces tend to be from the rest of our lives, I cannot help but feel that current trends in thinking about tranquility ultimately push us to work harder than we ever did before. We feel that by making time in our lives for brief instants of relaxation, we have even less of an excuse to slack off when living every other waking moment. We then feel even more guilty and grow even more stressed when we inevitably fail to live up to our expectations of ourselves.

The only way to stave off such feelings of anxiety and stress permanently from our lives, and to remain calm in the face of our shortcomings and failures, is to cultivate a state of inner peace that remains with us throughout our workday. It is time that we take seriously inner peace as a state of mind, rather than a moment in time.

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