Aequanimitas! The Day’s Work Done Well

In the spring of 1889, William Osler stood before the graduating physicians at the University of Pennsylvania and handed them a Latin word to carry the rest of their lives: Aequanimitas. Equanimity. The even mind. “In the physician or surgeon,” he told them, “no quality takes rank with imperturbability” — coolness under all circumstances, calmness amid storm, clearness of judgment in the moment of peril. But he added the other half quickly, lest anyone mistake it for a cold heart: imperturbability with a tender one. Years later he preached the companion sermon — live in day-tight compartments, do the day’s work well, and let tomorrow keep its own counsel.

Osler would have liked Saturday night in Oxford.

Pete Golding spent three years standing beside Lane Kiffin, running his defense, absorbing the week’s noise so the head coach didn’t have to. Then Kiffin left — for LSU, on the eve of the first College Football Playoff Ole Miss had ever reached, which is a particular way to leave a man. Golding didn’t chase him. Didn’t campaign, didn’t perform his grievance for the cameras. He took the job, kept his even mind, and went back to the day’s work. Saturday the man who left came home to Vaught-Hemingway, and Golding’s Rebels sent him back to Baton Rouge, 32–24.

Here’s the part Osler would have underlined. The quarterback who did the damage, Trinidad Chambliss, was a Division II kid Kiffin himself had found and remade. The instrument of the defeat was the departed man’s own gift, left behind like a tool on the bench. No cruelty in it — just the day’s work, done well, by the man who stayed. Kiffin is not the villain of the piece; he’s the other temperament, the restless mind that mistakes motion for progress and is always half-turned toward the next sideline. Aequanimitas is the road less traveled in that profession, and Saturday it kept its promise.

Which brings us, as these things do, to a guitar player in Tulsa. J.J. Cale wrote “After Midnight” and “Cocaine” and then did the most imperturbable thing a songwriter can do: he let Eric Clapton have them. Cale was near broke, half-ready to quit, when he first heard his own song come out of the radio in Clapton’s voice, driving through his hometown. He didn’t storm a stage or file a grievance. He built the laid-back Tulsa sound out of minor chords and low volume, kept cutting records nobody put on a billboard, let the work be the work — and let the royalties, in their own time, look after tomorrow. Even mind. Tender heart. Fifty years of the day’s work, done well.

Osler named it. Golding lived it Saturday. Cale played it for half a century. Aequanimitas — not the absence of feeling but the mastery of it; not indifference to the storm, but a steady hand while it blows through.

The day’s work, done well. It’s the only kind that lasts.

— The RFA Sports Desk