Tip of the day – Being at ease.

The paradox is striking - that being at ease is one of the most difficult things to do for most people! Most of us look for the causes all around us – the environment, the people, the past, the future, the circumstances et al. The answers lie elsewhere. I briefly touch upon three well-known concepts that aid the cause of embarking upon the task of simplifying being at ease.

The first deals with locus of control. Over a couple of decades back, I was introduced to the concept of the locus of control by an eminent management and leadership development professional who has since tasted significant corporate success in addition to authoring some good fiction and is a thought leader in the field. The concept was simple. The locus of control has to be within and not without. I could elaborate on this but it would for one, take the thrill out of interpreting it one’s own way and secondly, it is on a path of digression in the context of the current discussion. What we want to draw from this concept is the idea of the environment being distinct from oneself and the fact that we can, more often than not, only control things that are internal.

The second deals with the degrees of freedom. Students of science and/or statistics would have dealt with the concept of degrees of freedom. In layman’s terms, the degrees of freedom are the set of independent variables or parameters that define any state. To describe the current state in the context of oneself, the degrees of freedom would be, in a simplistic view, environment, time and the self.

The third is about state itself being a (I would have liked to add, a vector) combination of many dimensions of state. State could be viewed as physical state, emotional state, spiritual state, mental state et al.

Awareness of one’s current state along each of these dimensions, appreciation of the self being a (internal) degree of freedom on its own, and acceptance of the fact that the other two (external) degrees of freedom, environment and time, by definition are exactly that again – independent variables – is simply put, being at ease.

The concept is not stationary vis-à-vis the degrees of freedom, but transient. In other words, each of the states keeps changing with our position along the degrees of freedom. So our state – physical, emotional et al - changes with time and changes in the environment. Since movement along the external degrees of freedom is inevitable, if one’s state along all non-physical dimensions is a sole function of one’s self, one is likely to be at perpetual ease.

This is the essence of being at ease. It is being at ease with oneself.