The moment one kestrel outside the window erased her anxiety

Iris Murdoch was an Oxford moral philosopher and a Booker Prize-winning novelist. She held that morality is not a grand act of will but a constant effort to strip away self-centered fantasy and see others and the world accurately.

In The Sovereignty of Good, she describes looking out a window in an anxious, resentful state and suddenly noticing a hovering kestrel. As she watched it, the brooding self vanished and there was nothing but the kestrel—a process she called 'unselfing.'