Essential Ideas: Serenity

by The School of Life

The School of Life’s approach to calm - in a pocket format.

In the third of a series of pocket books, The School of Life has distilled its most essential ideas on serenity in order to produce a bitesize manual that is both useful and entertaining. 

Knowing how to fight off anxiety and remain calm belong to the greatest skills we can ever aspire to. Only with a serene state of mind are we in any position to enjoy all the other good things in friendship, love, family or work. Here is selection of The School of Life’s finest essays on the art of serenity. They teach us how to achieve the correct perspective on our problems, how to understand the worst of our fears and how to surround ourselves with the sort of people who can help us in our quest for a less anxious existence. 

We have – most of us – already spent far too long on needless worry; here at last is a crucial guide to the less turbulent future we deserve.

Genres: Psychology

96 pages, Paperback

Published November 12, 2024

About the author

The School of Life is a global organisation helping people lead more fulfilled lives.

We believe that the journey to finding fulfilment begins with self-knowledge. It is only when we have a sense of who we really are that we can make reliable decisions, particularly around love and work.

Sadly, tools and techniques for developing self-knowledge and finding fulfilment are hard to find – they’re not taught in schools, in universities, or in workplaces. Too many of us go through life without ever really understanding what’s going on in the recesses of our minds.

That’s why we created The School of Life; a resource for helping us understand ourselves, for improving our relationships, our careers and our social lives - as well as for helping us find calm and get more out of our leisure hours. We do this through films, workshops, books and gifts - as well as through a warm and supportive community.

Reviews

[Matías · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lo leí en un periodo de mucha ansiedad, compré Serenity y Love de The School of Life porque leer me relaja y para ver si alguna de las ideas en estos libros me ayuda.


voy a dejar quotes de secciones de estos libros que me hicieron sentir bien

Nature:
"The idea that we have the freedom to fashion our own destinies as we please has become central to our contemporary worldview; we are encouraged to imagine that we can, with time, create exactly the lives we desire, around our relationships, our work and our existence more generally. This hopeful scenario has been the source of extraordinary and unnecessary suffering."

"We face a litany of other burdens too: we will never be fully understood by others; we will always be burdened by primordial anxiety; we will never fully know what it is like to be someone else; we will invariably fantasise about more than we can have; we will realise that in key ways we cannot be who we want to be."

"The laws of nature are governed by forces nobody chose, no one can resist, and that brook no exception."

"Nature moves us away from our habitual tendency to personalise and rail against our suffering."

"Our own tantalisingly powerful, yet always limited agency stops, and where we will be left with no option but to bow to forces infinitely greater than our own.


Philosophical Meditation:
"However, the weight of our unthought thoughts and unfelt feelings can grow unbearable over time. They take their revenge on us for not giving them the attention they deserve. They wake us up in the middle of the night demanding to be heard; they give us twitches and, one day perhaps, serious illnesses. These neglected feelings and thoughts deserve to be examined and unfurled, for they contain a host of clues as to our future direction and needs."

"Philosophical Meditation proposes that we regularly set aside a portion of time and systematically set ourselves to answer in detail three core questions: What am I currently anxious about that I haven’t properly acknowledged? What am I upset or hurt about that I haven’t yet fully understood? And what am I currently excited about that I haven’t yet clearly identified or had the courage to integrate into my ambitions?"

"We need to establish habits that can regularly prompt us to undertake the arduous work of figuring out what is going on in our own minds."


Plan B:
"We’re a profoundly adaptable species. Perhaps we’ll have to leave town forever, maybe we’ll have to renounce an occupation we spent a decade nurturing, perhaps it will be impossible to remain with someone in whom we’d invested a lot…"

"In reality, there would be a possibility to relocate, to start afresh in another domain, to find someone else, to navigate around the disastrous event. There was no one script for us written at our birth, and nor does there need to be only one going forward."

"We’re liable to find a few people who will tell us, very sincerely, that their plan B ended up, in the end, superior to their plan A. They worked harder for it, they had to dig deeper to find it and it carried less vanity and fear within it."

"Crucially, we don’t need to know right now what our plan Bs might be. We should simply feel confident that we will, if and when we need to, be able to work them out."

"We should simply feel confident that, were the universe to command it, we would know how to find a very different path."


Premeditation:
"Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth. Reckon on everything, expect everything."

"By getting us to admit, frankly and bravely, that we are likely to encounter hell one day, it can leave us a little less distraught when it eventually comes our way."


Simplicity:
"There is no point wasting time we can ill afford on those who can’t non-defensively say ‘I love you’, with clothes that we can’t keep clean, with books we can’t understand and with crowded days heavy with panic and meaningless challenges."

"We’ll be properly mature, properly sophisticated even, by the time we learn to appreciate the art of being direct, easy to follow, emotionally straightforward, predictable, unhurried and – in the eyes of the frantic and impressionable many – exceptionally dull."


Unprocessed Emotion:
"There are many feelings that exist in an ‘unprocessed’ form within us."

"A great many worries may remain disavowed and un-interrogated and manifest themselves as powerful, directionless anxiety."

"We pay dearly for our failure to ‘process’ our feelings."

"We grow depressed about everything because we cannot be sad about something."

"We fail to know ourselves not out of laziness or casual neglect, but out of fear and shame."

"The outcome of processing our emotions is always an alleviation in our overall mood. But first we must pay for our self-awareness with a period of mourning in which we gradually acknowledge that, in some area or other, life is simply a lot sadder than we want it to be."

[Eviana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is short and does not need a long time to read from cover to cover. There are 25 topics related to Serenity discussed in this book. The issues I like the most are "Philosophical Meditation, Phones, and Plan B," coincidently ordered in a row. We can live more in ease and serenity if we do simple things like putting away our phones, meditating, and enjoying small pleasures.

Serenity is a topic that experts do not often explore. I believe serenity holds a crucial part in our lives such as our routine, managing our anger, and making decisions. This series can be an open door for more people to get to know The School of Life and go through the other specific books that someone needs the most. It's like a screening of our soul and emotional state what is lacking in our life and blocks the path to our happiness.

As the content is not that deep, readers can follow up on the more detailed topics that are available from The School of Life.
Thank you, Net Galley and The School of Life for providing ebook ARC.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of a series of short books on different themes. The books take a variety of topics and give definitions and scenarios and sets them against the overall theme.

The book is fascinating with many strange tangents and avenues. There are words like kintsugi, monasteries, philosophical meditation, home… each looking at how we see serenity and how important it is. I’ve taken loads of notes, especially on philosophical meditation - there are excellent questions to ask to focus your thoughts.

This is a small book but it’s packed with ideas and information.

I was given a copy of this book by NetGalley

[Ioana · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the classical way of the School of Life's books, this is a collection of tiny essays and ideas the authors hold close to the concept of Serenity.

With a distinct stoic flavour, this is a helpful guide to make a reader think about these ideas, how they apply to one's life and how, through them, one can foster more serenity.

I am grateful to have received this book in order to share my view on it, I appreciated its calm, realistic and down to earth approach.

[Beatrice Tibaldini · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a small book that you can read quickly in the evening. It was an occasionally interesting read, though at times a bit dull, almost as if there was less effort put into some of the topics covered. Overall, it seemed like a useful text, although the information felt somewhat haphazard in certain sections, lacking the care present in other parts. So, it’s a pleasant read but certainly not an essential piece of nonfiction.

[Gette · Rating 4 out of 5]

So happy I found this book…very short chapters. I read one each morning and mulled over the topic throughout the day. Some chapters are super short though and ideas not fully formed but the ones that were are food for thought. Will be revisiting these chapters throughout the year.

Rating system:
5 - Absolutely loved it!
4 - Enjoyed it / Interesting read
3 - Good / It was okay
2 - Could be better / Wasn’t that interesting
1 - Why did this even get published?

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hit this third volume after gobbling up the first two and immediately noticed that it wasn’t put together as well. Thematically it seemed to be about the power of pessimism and low expectations. I can see where they were going, but it wasn’t a serene experience. There was some good information, but the book lost its way.

Thanks to NetGalley and The School of Life for an ARC of this book.

[Maui Rochell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm glad to have come across this School of Life book this week because of the whirlwind of events happening in our life physically and mentally. It taught me to be grounded and still most especially during those moments where I had to lie still for the next 30 minutes listening to my baby's heartbeat.

[Kheira Bouazza · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautiful reminders on serenity