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

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

the art of sitting still (in other words, clearing the head and stilling the emotions)—and as I observed the sense of attention, kindness, and even delight that seemed to arise out of his life of going nowhere—I

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

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.

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

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,

Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else.

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” It’s the perspective we choose—not the places we visit—that ultimately tells us where we stand. Every time I take a trip, the experience acquires meaning and grows deeper only after I get back home and, sitting still, begin to convert the sights I’ve seen into l