# Life understood as the work of calming worlds `IA generated` To think calm as an ontological notion of the living means refusing to treat it as a secondary state, a psychological comfort, or a moral ideal. Calm is not what comes after life; it is one of the conditions through which life is able to exist at all. From this perspective, calm is not the absence of events or catastrophes, but the minimal stability that allows a living being to absorb them without being destroyed. Birth offers the clearest point of departure. Before birth, there is what can be called a uterine calm. This calm is not idyllic, but total in an ontological sense. Thermal continuity, chemical stability, rhythmic regularity, and the absence of separation between organism and environment define this condition. The living being does not yet confront the world; it is immersed in it. There is no adaptation because there is no exteriority in the strong sense of the term. Birth is therefore a catastrophe in the strict sense: a brutal rupture of milieu. Light, gravity, air, sound, hunger, and alterity irrupt all at once. The newborn is not thrown into a calm world, but into a world that is only potentially calm. Calm becomes something that must be reconstructed. From this moment on, life is inseparable from the task of finding or producing calm. This leads to a first ontological proposition: the living being is a being that seeks to re-establish calm after every rupture of its environment. This logic is not specific to humans. Natural catastrophes—fires, floods, glaciations—always destroy preexisting forms of calm. The living beings that persist do more than survive. Over time, they reorganize environments, rebuild relations, and stabilize conditions. Forests regrow, soils settle, ecosystems recompose themselves. The history of life is not a continuous progression, but a discontinuous sequence of losses and reconquests of calm. Ontologically, calm can thus be defined as the minimal form of stability without which the living would be dissolved by the world. From this point, human history can be reread as a history of calm. In early human societies, calm is not an abstract concept. It is directly tied to cycles: day and night, seasons, animal migrations, river floods. These societies do not seek peace in the modern sense, but relative continuity. Rituals, myths, taboos, and spatial arrangements function as techniques for limiting the impact of chaos and restoring a livable equilibrium. At this stage, the sacred often operates as a technology of calm. With sedentarization and agriculture, calm becomes a political issue. Stabilizing land, water, harvests, and borders becomes central. Early forms of the state emerge where the production of calm becomes an organized task. Yet this calm is immediately unequal. It is produced for some by exposing others to heightened instability. Calm becomes distributed. Empires radicalize this logic. They create zones of imperial calm—secured roads, orderly cities, stable trade—by exporting catastrophe elsewhere. Colonization can be understood as a systematic destruction of the calm of others: destabilized territories, disrupted economies, delegitimized cosmologies. Calm becomes spatially and racially privileged. Industrial modernity introduces another shift. It no longer promises calm, but mastery. Catastrophe is no longer an accident; it becomes a driving force: acceleration, competition, creative destruction. Calm is redefined as inertia. At the same time, modern societies devote enormous resources to producing artificial forms of calm: housing, sanitation, insurance, welfare states. Calm exists, but it is fragile, conditional, and unevenly distributed. In the contemporary period, a further rupture occurs. Catastrophes are no longer episodic; they become continuous and diffuse. Climate disruption, economic precarity, permanent political crisis, and informational saturation transform urgency into a normal condition of existence. For many living beings, human and non-human alike, calm becomes structurally inaccessible. At this point, calm reappears as a critical ontological category. Not as nostalgia for a lost harmony, but as a criterion of life itself. A world that no longer allows the reconstitution of calm is a world that undermines the very possibility of living, even if biological survival continues. To think calm ontologically today is therefore to ask a radical question: can a world that denies the time and space necessary to recover calm still be considered livable? Calm is not the opposite of catastrophe. It is what prevents catastrophe from becoming the permanent condition of life. Human history can thus be read as an oscillation between worlds that recognize the necessity of calm and worlds that organize its destruction. To reclaim calm is not to refuse conflict, history, or change. It is to refuse a world in which catastrophe becomes the ontological norm of existence.