GRACE: Fierce Benevolence
When Colleen Dawson's son was a third-grader, he shared a class in South Africa with Nelson Mandela's grandson. "On parents' night, [Mandela] visited, folding his six-foot frame into his grandson's desk," says Dawson. "Normally, we would have asked about homework and other silly details, but no one spoke. So he just started talking in a quiet, authoritative way about the important job of teaching. He's like a higher power; between the president and God there is Mandela."
Mandela put the tongue-tied parents at ease in the classiest way: He shifted the emphasis onto their shared interest in the school and elevated the agenda. Wise souls like Mandela rarely become overwhelmed by their own feelings or by discomfort. Their poise and impeccable timing allow them to strike the right emotional chord.
Grace is the quietest of the X-factors, perhaps the only one in which star power never threatens to overshadow substance. Graceful types are just as passionate and driven as their X-factored peers but rarely stir up the annoyance or suspicion we may feel toward bold or highly excitable people.
While grace is too elusive to pin down in a lab, we catch glimpses of it in studies of characteristics like wisdom and benevolence. Wisdom is associated with "meaning making," a trait ascribed to people who are introspective and cut to the heart of problems. Wisdom is also associated with benevolence, and it is in warm, compassionate individuals that we often see "grace." It is the X-factor presumed to spring from hard-won life experience: Mandela's 27 years in prison cultivated his legendary resolve.
Yet sage people begin life with certain shared proclivities. When Ravenna Helson of the University of California at Berkeley tracked women for 40 years, she concluded that subjects described as open and tolerant at age 21 were higher on a measure of wisdom in middle age, especially if they pursued psychotherapeutic or spiritual careers. "You can be wise as a young person," says Helson. "But wisdom increases between the ages of 27 and 52."
Another key to grace is equanimity, the ability to accept life's inevitable slings and arrows. A calm and composed demeanor is a central tenet of Buddhists, who believe that people must not let their emotional states oscillate wildly in response to life's vicissitudes. Through meditation, one can cultivate the mindfulness and compassion associated with grace. But you don't have to meditate to achieve equanimity.
"I'm a total failure at meditation," confesses Pankaj Mishra, author of a biography of the Buddha, An End to Suffering. Yet he learned to monitor his thoughts and feelings outside of the structure of meditation, and to curb his own desires. "To see the constant changing nature of the self is to realize that desire is worthless, because the person who has got what he desired is no longer the person who was desiring," explains Mishra.
Grace is not solely the provenance of ascetics and spiritual sophisticates, as Mishra makes clear. The charm and kindness that we associate with regal beauties like Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelley are another form of grace, one that surpasses their breeding and impeccable manners.
Just as Buddhists live by ethical precepts that determine the "right" action and speech, icons like Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy were supremely conscious of the correct way to uphold their public role (Prince Harry has yet to figure this out, and Princess Stephanie never did). The princess that Hepburn plays in Roman Holiday knows she must relinquish her personal freedom to serve her subjects; off-screen the actress used her radiant presence to lead an antifamine crusade.
Graceful prominent figures transcend their privileged existence to connect with the public. Instead of succumbing to her own grief, Jackie Kennedy stoically led her young son to deliver a heartbreaking salute at JFK's funeral. This grand gesture moved Americans because it allowed them to grieve along with her. Jackie recognized the exaggerated effect her actions would have on the world's stage. People possessed of X-factors know the hold they have over us. And if they use these qualities for the common good, we gladly go under their spell.
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