Peace!
Has this ever happened to you?
Your signal dropped. No reception. No feed.
And then - relief? Your mind, suddenly unoccupied, did what your mind does when left alone.
It wandered and maybe replayed a conversation from the week before. Then it linked two ideas you'd been struggling to connect. You sketched a solution in your head that had refused to appear hitherto. (haven't used that word for a while)
Nothing mystical. Just the work of a brain no longer under siege.
No?
Read this a few times.
‘You suffer more from your thoughts about a problem than the problem itself.’ - Epictetus
I really do need to give myself a break.
Peace then is the absence of the noise in our heads - those crazed stories (projections mostly) we layer and layer on a given difficulty.
I'm pretty slow. But, when was the last time you felt real peace?
It didn't occur to me to frame things this way but suddenly it presented itself as a first step to possible hope.
For me anyway, to be creative, deeply thoughtful, to emerge satisfied with any result I need peace.
And even that thought took far too much time to land. Probably because I don't get much. And it's my own fault. I carve time out deliberately for focussed work but that's no guarantee of peace. I strike big slots out of the calendar. Doesn't mean peace will happen.
Life seems engineered to keep peace out. Attention broken into fragments. Even focused work is sometimes just another source of agitation.
Peace feels to me to be the essential pre-condition for serious thinking.
Let's call it that moment when the internal noise drops low enough for something worthwhile to form.
Peace is not scheduled. It is created.
I definitely don’t have this challenge cracked but, during the last three years, since moving out of London, I have found more peace.
The changes didn’t commence as part of a grand plan and, even at my ripe old age, I’m still learning about myself almost every day. However, I can see and feel the continued evolution.
No social media apps on my iPhone or Mac.
A deliberate action to work through the settings every time I install a new app: invariably to turn off notifications.
I try to delete at least one app per month so I can keep all phone apps on a single home page.
When I cycle, I look around me rather than trying to catch up with podcasts.
When I’m walking, which is always daily thanks to having a wonderful canine companion, I take photos, I listen and watch the wild life that’s all around.
I could count on one hand how many times I’ve sat in front of a television in our new house, and I only do so as a deliberate action because I want to watch a specific programme.
Many will consider such deliberate actions anal or no fun. My fun is to be found in all the time I seem to have got back. Probably working harder than ever, but my dot collecting is going OK, I’m relatively fit and healthy, and still looking for new challenges.
Have a great day!