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Dear Friends and Colleagues, Today is the official publication date of Quiet Strength. My feelings are a mixture of joy, sadness, excitement, anxiety and deflation. I remind myself (frequently) that I can feel all these feelings and be equanimous at the same time. Like most books, this one has been a long pregnancy. And like most parents, I feel a certain wistfulness launching it into the world. About forty years ago I attended my first week-long equanimity meditation retreat. In the Vipassana tradition at the time, equanimity was cultivated by reflecting on phrases such as: “Your happiness and unhappiness are the result of your own thoughts and actions, not my wishes for you. Nonetheless, I will continue to wish for your happiness and freedom from suffering.” This is hardest where attachment runs deepest—children, both human and literary. The urge to control the outcome is strongest there, and identification with the result comes easily. Writing this book has been a steady practice in what Buddhists call “right effort”—not too tight, not too loose. Like my human child, the book has its own destiny and it does not define me… most days. Years ago I heard Robert Thurman say that children pick their parents. “It’s as though they say, this egg and this sperm are having a party I want to go to.” At the time it was the perfect antidote to many lingering complaints I clung to about my childhood. In a similar way, I have often felt that this book chose me rather than the other way around. It seems to have had a life of its own from the beginning. I sometimes joke (though not really) that I serve at the pleasure of this book. For most of the journey I’ve felt half a step behind it, just barely keeping up. It helps to remember all this today, as it heads out into the world. On this very same day, I am sending another baby out of the nest: Compassion Corps (CC). I founded CC in 2017 at the Compassion Institute and have poured my heart into this program ever since. Now, under the exquisite leadership of Maria Paula Jimenez and with the powerful stewardship of the Global Compassion Coalition, it is taking flight. If you would like an antidote to the doom and gloom of the news cycle, please watch the short video below which tells the story of Compassion Corps. One of the great joys of writing Quiet Strength was speaking with scholars and teachers from many religious traditions and exploring equanimity through their eyes. Today I’m reminding myself—and offering you—this evocation of equanimity from the Lebanese poet and Christian mystic Kahlil Gibran:
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