30.09.2026 Diary XXX Ataraxia: calm is not found by searching

30.09.2026 Diary Page XXX

As long as calm is a goal, it stays far away. The moment it stops being a goal, it comes.

Wednesday. The last day of September. I have a habit at the end of months: I sit down and do the month's accounts. What I finished, what I did not finish, which week went to waste.

I sat down this morning too. I opened the notebook, took the pen, and ten minutes later I closed it without writing anything.

The moment I closed it, the noise inside me stopped.

The source of the turbulence

The Greeks called the calm state of the soul ataraxia. The word itself is built on negation: taraxis means turbulence, and the a at the front removes it. So calm is described not by the addition of something but by the withdrawal of something.

Epicurus set it up like this. What disturbs a person is not events themselves but the false beliefs we hold about those events. If you are wrong about what you need, nothing you have is enough.

Pyrrho's way was harsher. According to him, turbulence came from feeling obliged to pass a judgment about everything. If you suspended judgment, the turbulence stopped too.

What I did this morning when I closed the notebook was exactly this, and I was not aware of it.

The painter's sponge

Sextus Empiricus tells this idea with a story, and the story has stayed with me for years.

The painter Apelles was painting a picture of a horse. Every part of the picture was done, the only thing missing was the foam at the horse's mouth. He tried the foam again and again, none of it worked. Finally, in anger, he threw at the picture the sponge he used to wipe off his paints. Where the sponge hit the canvas, the foam he had been looking for appeared.

Sextus uses this to explain how calm comes. It is not found while chasing it. It comes the moment you stop running, because you stopped.

There is a side of this story that disturbs me. Because it is very easy to read as a recipe: "let go, it will come by itself." Yet Apelles is someone who had spent years learning to paint horses. The hand that throws the sponge does not throw it for nothing. The rest of the picture is already finished.

So for letting go to work, something has to have been done first.

What my end-of-month account was doing

I went back to that notebook and asked what it was good for.

The account works like this. On the left side what was done, on the right side what was not done. The left side is always short, the right side is always long. Because only what I finished goes on the left; on the right goes everything that crossed my mind at the beginning of the month.

This is a scale set up to lose from the start. On one side are things that happened, on the other side things that were imagined. The two are not in the same unit.

In the piece on all-or-nothing thinking I had described the everyday version of this. The end-of-month notebook is that same thing meeting the calendar: it reduces thirty days to a single verdict, and that verdict almost always comes out the same.

We come to the place Epicurus describes. What disturbed me was not September itself. It was the sentence I made about September.

So should I stop keeping accounts

I need to be careful here, because this idea suits me very much, and I have learned to be more suspicious of ideas that suit me.

The sentence "I am giving up evaluating myself" can be the polite form of avoiding measurement. If I do not measure, I do not get bad news either. This is not calm; it is closing your eyes.

I find the difference like this. When Pyrrho suspends judgment he does not stop looking. On the contrary: he keeps looking, he just does not immediately turn what he sees into a verdict.

So the point is not to close the notebook. It is to look at the notebook and not make the sentence "so this is how I am."

The month's account is data. "I am incompetent" is a verdict. There is a leap in between, and I am the one making that leap, not the notebook.

What I did today

I opened the notebook again and this time wrote only the left side.

I never built the list of what was not done. When I did not build it, an interesting thing happened: the length of the left side surprised me. Seventeen items came out. For the first time I saw seventeen items by themselves, without the shadow of the right side.

None of them was new. I had done all of them during the month. But each of them, on the day it was done, had shrunk and vanished next to the things not done.

I had written about work going unseen for other people. It turns out the person I had been seeing least was myself.

The matter of subtraction

The idea that calm is a subtraction, not an addition, is something that can spread over the whole month.

Instead of looking at what I added in September, I looked at what I left. What I left is this: opening work after eleven at night, reopening finished work to check it, reading a text four times after sending it.

All three were things I did at the beginning of the month. All three decreased by themselves during the month.

A habit decreasing does not go on the list, because lists count what is done. Yet in some months the real work is stopping doing something.

Epicurus's three boxes

Epicurus does not put all the desires that disturb a person in the same bag. He divides them into three, and today the division felt very familiar to me.

First box: those that are both natural and necessary. Food, water, sleep, shelter, the easing of pain. When these are not met a person really is unsettled, and the source of the unsettledness is not belief, it is the lack itself.

Second box: natural but not necessary. Delicious food, a big house, nice clothes. Wanting is natural; and you live without them.

Third box: neither natural nor necessary. Fame, unlimited wealth, everyone's approval. These have no point of satiety. When you go after a desire with no point of satiety, the turbulence never ends because there is no place described to arrive at.

I applied this scheme to my own end-of-month notebook and a shameful result came out.

Almost the whole of the not-done list was from the third box. Producing more, being more visible, not falling behind. Next to none of them was written "this much is enough."

The ones in the first box were not on the list at all. Sleep is not on the list. Food is not on the list. The things I wrote about in the piece on self-care were not counted as important enough to enter the end-of-month assessment.

Here lies Epicurus's real claim. According to him there is no pleasure beyond the absence of pain; that is, when you fill the first box you have reached the place you can reach. The rest is variety.

Those who think this claim is too modest may be right. But when tried on the end-of-month notebook, it does this: it fills both pans of the scale correctly. Ten nights without sleep are data as heavy as three unfinished projects. In my notebook one was counted, the other was not.

Calm and numbness

This concept has a danger, and for someone with ADHD the danger stands closer.

Calm can be confused with lack of feeling. Even the state the Stoics called apatheia is read as "feeling nothing" because of the word's present-day associations. Yet both describe not the absence of emotion, but the emotion not dragging a person along.

I had dealt with the everyday counterpart of this confusion in the piece on whether medication changes your personality. The first fear of most people starting treatment is this: if I calm down, won't I stop being me?

The logic of the fear is understandable. Someone who has lived with turbulence for a long time cannot separate the turbulence from themselves. Thinking fast, sudden enthusiasm, getting caught up in an idea and working until midnight. These are as much an identity as a problem.

But the calm Epicurus describes is not the disappearance of these things. It is a person not being forced to drift after them.

The difference shows up here. When an idea comes, I still get excited. What changes is that I do not open a new project at two in the morning with that excitement. The excitement stays, the drifting stops.

What I felt today when I closed the end-of-month notebook was not emptiness. It was more like a window that had been constantly open being shut. The things in the room are in the same place; only the wind stopped.

What I listened to today

Arvo Pärt — Da Pacem Domine.

A piece written for choir, moving very slowly. The voices pile on top of each other, none stands out, none competes.

The reason I find this piece fitting today is this: the name of the thing asked for appears in the text but the music does not ask for it. It does not plead, does not force, does not try to arrive anywhere. It does not describe calm; it is calm.

Like Apelles's sponge. It stays at the place where you stop looking for what you were looking for.

Toward tomorrow

Tomorrow is October. I have not written a goal for the new month, deliberately.

The only thing I wrote is this: I will keep the left side day by day. I will not wait for the end of the month. Because what September taught me is that what is done going unseen is a matter of memory. Thirty days later the only thing remembered is the things not remembered.