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Equanimity is not passivity.

Outrage has the illusion of clarity.

Values can help support emotional balance.

In a time when corruption no longer hides its face and political violence is increasing, outrage has become the default language of public life. Equanimity may seem irrelevant—or worse, complicit. What kind of person stays calm in the face of injustice? Who, in their right mind, resists the pull toward righteous indignation when world leaders violate essential norms of human decency?

And yet, I’d like to suggest something quietly radical: that equanimity, rightly understood, is not passivity—but resistance. A deeper kind of resistance. One that refuses to be hijacked by the very forces it seeks to oppose.

A few months ago, I met john a. powell (who does not capitalize the letters of his name) at a backyard get-together. Given his position as director of the Institute for Othering and Belonging at UC Berkeley and as a prominent voice for equity, I expected our conversation—centered on funding cuts and Department of Justice investigations into colleagues at UC Berkeley—to be tinged with shared outrage. But john didn’t meet my indignation with more fire. He simply smiled—a true “Duchenne” smile—and said, “I just stick to my values.”

That sentence has echoed in me ever since.

It clarified something I had only been circling: that equanimity is an act of resistance, an assertion of dignity. It is the quiet refusal to be swept up in the........

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