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

Sitting still as a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it; I’d seldom thought of it like that. Going nowhere as a way of cutting through the noise and finding fresh time and energy to share with others;

ago, it’s not our experiences that form us but the ways in which we respond to them;

Going nowhere, as Cohen described it, was the grand adventure that makes sense of everywhere else.

William James, reminded us, “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.

With machines coming to seem part of our nervous systems, while increasing their speed every season, we’ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off—our holy days, as some would have it; our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, perma

seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it’s often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize.

The one thing technology doesn’t provide us with is a sense of how to make the best use of technology.

Henry David Thoreau, one of the great explorers of his time, reminded himself in his journal, “It matters not where or how far you travel—the farther commonly the worse—but how much alive you are.

“There is nothing either good or bad,” as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” So much of our lives takes place in our heads—in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation—that sometimes I feel that I can best change my life by changing the way I look at