Author
Chade-Meng Tan
Published
2016
First read
May 2025
A light, quick read that I took a few concepts away from. I’m not sure most of this was new material but sometimes it’s helpful to retread similar territory to (re)learn ideas.
It’s useful to distinguish between joy and happiness. Joy is more of an in-the-moment feeling of pleasure while happiness is a more lasting state of being.
There’s a good connection drawn between training the mind (e.g. through meditation) and the development of emotional resilience. The more able you are to calm your mind in a difficult situation the more you can perceive what’s happening with your emotions and work to approach the situation with compassion.
He shares an metaphor from a friend that big opportunities have this moment akin to flying between trapezes: you have to let go of what you’re holding on to and be unattached in midair before you can land on the next trapeze.
I hadn’t before come across the connection he draws between familiarization and meditation. As he writes, “The more the mind is in contact with any mental quality (such as calm or joy), the more familiar it becomes with it, and the more familiar the mind becomes with that mental quality, the more quickly and easily it gets it.” He builds off of this later by noting how once you can incline the mind toward a thought or feeling the more it will happen effortlessly.
The difference between healthy and unhealthy sadness is despair. Healthy sadness is sadness without despair. Sadness without despair comes from the confidence that you have the inner resources to deal with difficulties. Where do those inner resources come from? Training the mind.
Every now and then, I remind myself, these emotions that I feel, they are simply sensations in my body—these emotions are not me. In addition, those thoughts that come alongside these bodily sensations, they are simply thoughts—these thoughts are also not me.
