In a gallery in Birmingham, there’s a painting. When you stand still, it looks flat. If you move a bit to the side, however, the corridors will…shift.
It feels like you’re wandering the halls of an art gallery — inside a painting in an art gallery. It’s marvelous. Magical. And hella confusing.
The trick is, of course, that the painting is not flat at all. It’s made of three-dimensional, pyramid-shaped cones, sticking out from the canvas. It’s a sculpture disguised as a painting, and your mind struggles to tell the difference. From the right perspective, however, you can clearly see it.
If art was the only thing twisting our mind into a knot, that’d make it a fun pastime activity. Unfortunately, it is not.
Every day, we look at objects and come to the wrong conclusions about them. We hear words and fail to decode them. We see behavior and assume intentions that don’t exist. Something happens, and we immediately go: “This is what it must mean!” Yet, we have no idea.
The Stoics used the word “eustatheia” to describe a state of steadiness, gained from proper judgment. When you correctly assess reality, you neither overestimate nor underestimate what happens in your environment. You give each event the credit it deserves, but no more. You don’t neglect, and you don’t panic.
Eustatheia means your feet are planted firmly on the ground, and each step you take comes from a position of calm. How do you attain it? You filter. Your mind is a powerhouse of reason and logic. Use it!
Imagine a hair straightener: Every hair you run through it will be straight. Whatever hairs you don’t, they’ll do whatever. They could curl, twist, bend, or even break. According to Ryan Holiday, our mind is a straightener for reality:
That’s what our reason can do — it can take the crooked, confusing, and overwhelming nature of external events and make them orderly.
What those events are does not matter at all. They could be a minor slight by a coworker or a natural disaster that upends our town. How much power we give to either depends entirely on our interpretation. Epictetus, one of the great Stoic philosophers, said that what happens in our lives is “only the raw material for our reasoned choice.”
Life is like that painting: It can be magical, marvelous, but also hella confusing. If you look at it from the wrong angle, all your interpretations will be crooked — and so will everything that follows: Your opinions, your emotions, and even your decisions.
That’s not a good way to live. You’ll carry a lot of misery, and it’ll be mostly self-inflicted. If you use reason, goodwill, and a healthy dose of skepticism towards your own judgments, however, everything in life will stay within its context. The corridor will always be straight — because so is your perspective.
The next time you see a bear in the street, pause. Don’t run. Don’t panic. Tilt your head. Change your perspective. Chances are, you’ll break into a smile: The bear is not real. It’s a painting.
Once again, reality just tested your mind. So get out there and straighten it.