Friday, August 9, 2019

Never alone with God

In "The Sound of Silence" Joel Pavelski describes what happened when he decided on a month with "No music. No podcasts. No excuses." From the article:
.... As the first few days of my sound fast went on, I showered in silence. I worked out without any motivational music, and every movement felt more considered, as though I was touching base with each part of my body while it was moving. I was friendlier to the other people walking dogs in my neighborhood. After a year and a half of running into them, I finally learned their names. I remembered to bring books on the subway.

Inside, my mind felt like it was sloughing off some kind of dullness, a hibernating animal waking from a long winter slumber. After a week, I felt more alert. More present. Peaceful. ....

Neuroscientists and psychologists estimate that we spend 15 to 20 percent of our waking hours daydreaming, drifting away from the task at hand and allowing the mind to refocus on our innermost feelings and fantasies. When your brain is relaxed, it doesn’t stop working. In fact, it never really goes offline. In the 1990s, Washington University neurologist Marcus Raichle discovered that a scattered collection of the brain’s pieces begin to fire in sync when your mind wanders. This neural network comes to life when you’re not focused on a specific task; it reviews the things that you already know and connects them in new ways. ....

“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets,” essayist Tim Kreider wrote, describing the function of this neural network in the New York Times. “The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration—it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”

I started looking for moments in my day to open up the space Kreider talks about. I forced myself to stand outside on my patio for twenty minutes every morning, coffee cup in hand, watching the world light up. I went on long walks just for the hell of it. I took breaks in the middle of the day to go to the Hudson River waterfront, to sit on a bench for a few minutes, admiring the view.

Instead of quieting down during these moments, my brain felt blissful and busy, lighting up with challenges to solve, reframing and reorganizing possibilities. When I returned from a walk or a break, I came back with a new idea or a problem that I’d solved: a thoughtful birthday gift for an old friend, a perfect response to the text I was avoiding. I planned my days in these moments, reordered my priorities and took stock of my performance honestly. ....

Novelist and short-story writer Sara Maitland, in her thoughtful and serene A Book of Silence, writes about expansive periods of tranquility spent in the Sinai desert, the Scottish hills, and a remote hovel on the Isle of Skye. ....

“In the Middle Ages, Christian scholastics argued that the devil’s basic strategy was to bring human beings to a point where they are never alone with God, and never attentively face to face with another human being,” she writes. “The mobile phone therefore represents a powerful breakthrough for the forces of hell.” ....

During my month of silence, I learned to stop drowning myself in stimulation. And when I quit layering on background audio as a convenient distraction, I found what I was looking for: permission and time to meet my unconscious self, rising up from the silence. It taught me that it’s okay to take a walk. That I’m not going to miss out if I’m not plugged in to something every minute of the day. That my brain works best with a little free time.

The truth is, it’s a little terrifying to be truly alone with yourself in stillness. But you can only know who you are, what you think, and what you have to say when you stop avoiding yourself. .... (more)

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