Calm under pressure

Thomas Jefferson wrote:

Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.

I was recently looking into a Jewish spiritual practice called mussar, and the first desirable characteristic to be developed in that practice is to maintain one's equilibrium at all times, avoiding both highs and lows. This smacks of the Buddhist practice of detachment. There's also that poem, by Rudyard Kipling?, about keeping one's head while others are losing theirs.

I don't fly off the handle much, but do occasionally veer towards depression or anxiety. Which is why I take a prescription mood stabilizer.

If avoiding unpleasant mental states is not sufficient motivation to try to remain calm, perhaps it would be worth it to gain some advantage by thinking rationally while others are being governed by emotion.

No Luck so Far

I haven't been able to reach my website guru to see if he can help me transfer my old entries. Apparently blogging software is all proprietary and it's no simple matter to translate entries made using one program into entries that are usable by another program. Oh well.

I'm taking a refresher class in Torah chanting these days. I first studied it about 20 years ago, but haven't kept up the skill. I don't think we used a textbook then. We got a cassette tape, which I promptly transcribed into sheet music - which I do still have. Nowadays, we have a textbook that comes with a CD, and the music is transcribed in the back of the book. But in the strangest key! So I'm transposing the music into a key that makes musical and vocal sense to me, and also notating phrases that illustrate how the motifs fit words with more or fewer syllables than is ideal.

I'm starting to wish I'd also signed up for the Hebrew class that's running concurrently, but I decided not to take it because I already have a rudimentary grasp of the alphabet and vowel symbols. It'll be OK.