Being in London, I’ve seen the “Keep Calm and Carry On” image on just about everything: mugs, tees, cards, etc. I like the effortless simplicity of expressing a very powerful idea to make everyone’s day a bit better. The history is interesting: the colorful, modern-looking posters were created by the British government at the onset of WWII, to raise morale. It wasn’t much used for a variety of reasons, but was re-discovered in 2000 and found new life, once again for a variety of reasons. It’s a fairly timeless message (and a modern marketer’s dream, I might add).
It reminds me of the second Yoga Sutra, yogas-citta-vrtti-nirodhah: yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. I think this Sutra is the essence of why we do yoga – to get all those voices inside our head to, forgive me, shut the hell up. That little slice of silence that happens when we forget about all our internal dialogues – the citta, the ongoing chatter – is what brings us back to the mat again and again. Our yoga practice then provides us with many tools to take off the mat, so that we can keep calm and carry on in our daily lives.
Apparently, no one knows who came up with Keep Calm and Carry On…I wonder if he/she did yoga.