{"id":42,"date":"2009-07-17T06:12:54","date_gmt":"2009-07-17T11:12:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joeljmiller.com\/?p=42"},"modified":"2012-10-31T06:00:02","modified_gmt":"2012-10-31T12:00:02","slug":"escape-the-busyness-and-find-inner-calm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/joeljmiller\/2009\/07\/escape-the-busyness-and-find-inner-calm\/","title":{"rendered":"Escape the busyness and find inner calm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"Escape<\/a>
50 Watts, Flickr<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

\u201cThe most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness,\u201d said Spanish philosopher Jos\u00e9 Ortega y Gasset in his book Mission of the University<\/em>: \u201cit is always urgent, \u2018here and now\u2019 without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.\u201d <\/p>\n

Another philosopher and artist, Wyndham Lewis, saw the problem this way: \u201cEverything in our life today conspires to thrust most people into . . . a sort of trance of action,\u201d he said in the 1957 preface to his book Time and Western Man<\/em>. \u201cHurrying, without any significant reason, from spot to spot at the maximum speed obtainable, drugged in that mechanical activity, how is the typical individual of this epoch to do some detached thinking for himself? All his life is disposed with a view to banishing reflection.\u201d <\/p>\n

For Ortega y Gasset or Lewis, we\u2019ve lost the time to think and contemplate and find inner calm, and I suspect it\u2019s truer now than when they wrote. Schedules, regimens, agendas, infoclutter, datagluts, distractions \u2014 there\u2019s more to keep up with now than at any other time in history. I can start my day one moment and then pause to find it\u2019s already three in the afternoon. Sometimes I hardly know where the day has gone. I\u2019m trapped in that trance of action, devoid of reflection, all busyness and no calm.<\/p>\n

But I think my suspicion is probably bunk. It\u2019s always been this way.<\/p>\n

\u201c[O]ne of the gravest perils which besets the ministry,\u201d said Scottish minister Andrew Bonar, \u201cis a restless scattering of energies over an amazing multiplicity of interests which leaves no margin of time and of strength for receptive and absorbing communion with God.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bonar was concerned with church life, but the overlap with Ortega y Gasset and Lewis is pretty clear. And, interestingly, Bonar died in 1892, long before our modern woes. You can go back even further and find the fourth- and fifth-century Christian monastic writers wrestling with aspects of the same problem.<\/p>\n

Our \u201cmultiplicity of interests\u201d yanks us off the contemplative path. That it can happen as easily in the fourth, fifth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries says more about our inherent lack of discipline than our increasingly stimuli-rich environments. <\/p>\n

We can filter those stimuli; we do it reflexively all the time. The trick is being mindful about it \u2014 filling that filtered space and time with something singular and substantive. Philosopher Immanuel Kant started each day with a few cups of tea and his pipe. According to biographer Manfred Kuehn<\/a>, \u201cThe time he needed for smoking it \u2018was devoted to meditation.\u2019\u201d Bonar similarly made prayer and meditation central to his day.<\/p>\n

In his book, Thoughts in Solitude<\/em>, Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton said that \u201cOurs is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what if we stopped? What if we could step outside the \u201cprescribed tracks\u201d and snap out of the \u201ctrance of action\u201d to collect our minds, gather the loose threads of thought, and regain focus? We need to if we have any hope of establishing and maintaining internal peace. <\/p>\n

\u201cTime is the real currency of our age,\u201d as Robert Benson says in his helpful book In Constant Prayer<\/em>, \u201cand we have to manage our time in relation to our spiritual life as much as we do in relation to any other part of our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Time does not create itself. It is scarce and like any scarce commodity has to be cordoned off, fenced in, and protected \u2014 or it will be stolen at gunpoint. <\/p>\n

Use a pipe, use a prayer book, whatever works for you. Find a practice to intrude in the coercive urgency of life. And do it now. Says Ortega y Gasset, \u201cWe cannot put off living until we are ready.\u201d We never will be. The world never will be. Tell it to wait while you do the same.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness,\u201d said Spanish philosopher Jos\u00e9 Ortega y Gasset in his book Mission of the University: \u201cit is always urgent, \u2018here and now\u2019 without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.\u201d Another philosopher and artist, Wyndham Lewis, saw the problem this way: \u201cEverything in our life […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1270,"featured_media":4432,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[141,332,381,446,547,573,586,689,738],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-prayer-2","tag-contemplation","tag-immanuel-kant","tag-jose-ortega-y-gasset","tag-meditation","tag-prayer","tag-reflection","tag-robert-benson","tag-thomas-merton","tag-wyndham-lewis"],"yoast_head":"\nEscape the busyness and find inner calm<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\""The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness," said Spanish philosopher Jos\u00e9 Ortega y Gasset in his book Mission of the University: "it is\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/joeljmiller\/2009\/07\/escape-the-busyness-and-find-inner-calm\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Escape the busyness and find inner calm\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\""The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness," said Spanish philosopher Jos\u00e9 Ortega y Gasset in his book Mission of the University: "it is\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/joeljmiller\/2009\/07\/escape-the-busyness-and-find-inner-calm\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Joel J. 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