St. Charles Borromeo is credited as having offered up the following meditation on the concept of humility:

The best way not to find the bed too cold is to go to bed colder than the bed is.

Humility is a very difficult virtue to describe in a satisfactory manner, precisely because you risk destroying it by attempting to enumerate too many praiseworthy things about it. St. Charles’ approaches it by way of example, and describes it be relating it to a common action: repairing to one’s bed at the end of the day. To retreat to a warm bed for one’s due rest is a wonderful thing, but a bed that is icy cold upon your arrival thereat is a decidedly unpleasant experience. Or, at least, it can be.

The temperature of the bed at the time we arrive at it is largely beyond our control. Given enough foresight, we might remember to turn the thermostat up somewhat, so as to warm the entire room (and with it, the bed). Of course, this can have negative consequences; it can be difficult to sleep in a room where the air in the room is over-warm despite the bed being at a comfortable temperature. We might also remember to set out a hot water bottle beneath the sheets, although we are then obviously at the mercy of the water within and the potentially scalding heat it brings to the sheets about it. The point, I suppose, is that even the mitigations we might employ to prepare the bed for our arrival aren’t necessarily assured to work, nor can we completely control all the outcomes thereof…just as we really can’t control overmuch how cold or warm the bed will be at the end of the day if we leave it unattended.

Warmth is relative, somewhat; cold tap water feels warm to hands that have been outside in winter weather without good gloves, for example. And humility, in St. Charles’ description, means we accept that there are things which escape our control, and instead adjust ourselves and our own state — which we can control — to compensate for what is beyond our control.

In essence then, it is an attitude of serenity in the face of what can’t be changed. But it is also an attitude of confidence — though not pride — in one’s own state, resources, and knowledge, and one’s ability to use these things wisely to surmount situations.