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

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

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

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.

Going nowhere, as Leonard Cohen would later emphasize for me, isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.

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

Going nowhere, as Cohen had shown me, is not about austerity so much as about coming closer to one’s senses.

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

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

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