The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere (TED Books)

Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from a phone call. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes—which means we’re never caught up with our lives.

did feel that spending time in silence gave everything else in my days fresh value and excitement.

It’s only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day. And it’s only by going nowhere—by sitting still or letting my mind relax—that I f

These days, in the age of movement and connection, space, as Marx had it in another context, has been annihilated by time; we feel as though we can make contact with almost anywhere at any moment. But as fast as geography is coming under our control, the clock is exerting more and more tyranny over us. And the more we can contact others, the more,

In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still. You can go on vacation to Paris or Hawaii or New Orleans three months from now, and you’ll have a tr

So often I see vacations as just a way to direct my work habits and relentlessness toward mapping out schedules and organizing train tickets, less concerned with the quality of my time than the quantity. A flight for me had always been a chance to catch up on job-related reading, to see movies I’d never been tempted to see when they were playing at

But the next time I was flying home—from New York to California—I tried to take a page out of my former seatmate’s near-empty book. I didn’t turn on my monitor. I didn’t race through a novel. I didn’t even consciously try to do nothing: when an idea came to me or I recalled something I had to do back home, I pulled out a notebook and scribbled it d

Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great Jewish theologian of the last century, had it, “a cathedral in time rather than in space”; the one day a week we take off becomes a vast empty space through which we can wander, without agenda, as

You don’t get over the shadows inside you simply by walking away from them.