The Thing It Landed OnChapter 11 of 149 min
This is not coldness
About nine months after he started doing this, Paul's daughter stopped telling him things.
She did not announce it and there was no row. She began with the small ones — the thing at work, the friend who had been unkind — and after a while the larger ones went the same way, and by the spring he was finding out about her life in the way you find out about a colleague's.
What she said eventually, in a car, not looking at him, was: "You're very calm about everything now."
She did not mean it kindly and he did not take it kindly, and he has spent a long time since working out what she had actually seen.
She had seen the commonest way to get this wrong, and it is common because it works. It takes the pressure off immediately. It feels like progress. And from inside, it is almost impossible to tell apart from the real thing.
So this chapter is the one about the counterfeits — and there is a test at the end that catches all of them at once, which is just as well, because you will not catch them by introspection. Every one of them feels like peace from the inside.
The five things it is not
It is not minding less. There is a move available where you simply decide a thing did not land — where you notice the remark going in, and you put something over it, and you call the quiet that follows equanimity. It is not equanimity. It is the lid on. You can tell the difference about four days later, when something unrelated and quite small makes you much angrier than it should.
It is not altitude. This is the one Paul had. You find that less reaches you, and that is genuinely what happens, and then somewhere in there the not-being-reached becomes the point. You are above it. You are the still one in the room. People notice it, and some of them admire it, and the admiration is the trap closing, because now there is a new place to stand and it is a very good one — and a place to stand is a place that can be hit, which is where this book came in.
It is not leaving the room. Withdrawal is easy to mistake for steadiness because both are quiet. But one of them is still there and the other one has gone, and the person in front of you can always tell which, even when they cannot say so.
It is not thinking less of yourself. This is the serious one and it runs the opposite way to everything above. People hear you are not the thing you thought you were and arrive at so I am nothing — and then they call the nothing humility and feel wretched and believe they are getting somewhere.
They are not, and it is worth being exact about why, because feeling wretched is such convincing evidence of progress.
A low opinion of yourself is a position. It is arrived at the same way as a high one, by the same machinery, and it is defended just as hard — try telling somebody who has decided they are useless that they are not, and watch how much argument you get. It is measured, which means somebody is doing the measuring, and it is about you, which is the whole address. The man who cannot stop saying he is the best in the room and the man who cannot stop saying he is the worst are standing in the same spot, facing opposite ways, and neither of them is going anywhere.
So there is nothing to choose between them, and the two things to put down are a pair: thinking too much of yourself, and thinking too little. The second one is harder to spot only because it wears the clothes of a virtue.
Whatever this is, it does not live where you think little of yourself. Those two cannot occupy the same place at the same time. If what you are doing is lowering your estimate of yourself, you are doing something else, and it has a different name, and it will not end well.
And it is not a thing to say to anybody else. Ever, more or less, and certainly not to someone in trouble. That is just your ego. You are taking that too personally. It only lands because you let it. All true sentences, and all of them, aimed outward, weapons. There is a reason this book has spent ten chapters on your own week and not on anybody else's.
Where there is harm, none of this applies first
Plainly, because it needs to be plain.
If somebody is hurting you — a partner, a parent, an employer, anybody — then the first thing to do is not to examine what it landed on. The first thing is to stop the harm. Leave, report, tell somebody, get help.
Nothing here replaces any of that, and a frame that can be used to explain why you should stay and be steady about it is being used wrongly. Understanding something is not the same as being obliged to stand in it.
The test, which is not about you
Here is the useful thing, and it is useful because it does not require you to judge your own inner weather, which you are not in a position to do.
Are you easier to be near than you were, or harder?
That is the whole test, and you do not get to answer it. The people around you have already answered it and are not going to volunteer the answer.
So you look at the evidence instead. Is more being told to you or less? Do people start sentences with you and finish them? Has anybody said, in the last few months, some version of you seem very calm now in a voice that was not entirely admiring? Did a person who used to argue with you stop?
If it has made you harder to be near, you have the wrong thing. Not a weaker version of the right thing — a different thing, going somewhere else.
And this is not a moral rule I am adding on at the end. It is the actual sign. The whole claim of this book is that the energy spent holding a position is energy, and that when the position stops needing defending the energy does not evaporate, it comes back. It has to go somewhere. If none of it is arriving where people can feel it, it did not come back — it was never released, and something has gone quiet that was supposed to get louder.
The one you can take yourself
The test above is deliberately out of your hands, and that is uncomfortable to live with for a year. So here is a second one, which is yours, and which is not a feeling.
How long does it last now?
Something lands on a Tuesday. How long is it still there — an afternoon, an evening, four days? Not how badly it hurt, which you cannot compare across months, and not whether you handled it well. How long.
That number can be read off a clock. It needs nobody's opinion and it cannot be talked into, which is the trouble with every measurement that asks how you feel: a person who has gone up to altitude feels marvellous, and would pass that examination every time. A Thursday cannot be persuaded.
It also moves before anything else does. The afternoon becomes an hour, then nine minutes, and you will notice it in the arithmetic long before you notice it in yourself.
And one warning that belongs here rather than anywhere else. If you ever catch yourself working at being easy to be near — making yourself visibly available, noticing whether people are telling you more, pleased when they do — then it has become a position, and you are standing on it, and the whole thing has turned over on you. The test is for reading once in a while, like a meter. It is not a thing to get good at.
What it looks like when it is the other one
Short, because this is the chapter about the counterfeits and there are two more to come.
The person who has it is more available, not less. They are easier to interrupt. They mind about what happens to you specifically and they are not remotely above it. They can be argued with, and you can tell them something bad without having to manage how they will take it, which is the rarest of all of these and the one people notice first.
What has gone is not the caring. What has gone is the second thing that used to arrive with the caring — the small, fast calculation about what this means about them.
Tonight
Two minutes. One question and you are not allowed to answer it from the inside.
Think of the person who tells you the least. Not the one you are furthest from — the one who used to tell you more than they do now. Most people have one and can find them in about four seconds.
Then ask: when did that change, and what changed around the same time?
You may get nothing, and nothing is a perfectly good answer; this is a question with a long return. But if you got a date, and something of yours is sitting next to that date, that is worth more than a month of examining your own composure.
And if it turns out to be you, the repair is not an apology. It is going back and being interruptible. You do not have to explain any of this to them, and you should not try.
Next, the one place where none of this has worked — which almost everybody has, which is reliably the one that matters most, and which is not the failure it looks like from inside.