October 11
Learn to be still. In patient waiting by the river dwells a calm that no ambition has ever known.
The Compleat Angler (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Learn to be still. In patient waiting by the river dwells a calm that no ambition has ever known.
When you sit down on a park bench without your phone, the first quarter of an hour is rarely calm. You remember the messages you still meant to write. You wonder whether you haven't been sitting there too long already, and look for a reason for this pause. At first the stillness feels like something you are neglecting.
A large part of your day is geared to the idea that time produces something: an answer, some progress, or at least a new piece of information. An hour in which none of that comes about is hard to judge by this measure. It fails.
At some point you may stop measuring. Then you notice that the duck by the bank keeps swimming back to the same spot, and that the water turns darker as soon as the wind picks up. None of it is useful, and you weren't looking for it either. You see it only because you stayed long enough.
Next time, too, the first quarter of an hour will probably be restless again.
