A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
Throw the ball at the wall. Catch. Repeat. That’s the activity. But within that simplicity lies a calming that can help you feel relaxed and centred.
It’s meditative: the rhythm-throw, bounce, catch-creates the same focused attention as a breathing meditation. Your mind quiets because it’s occupied with simple repetition, not because you’re forcing it quiet.
Steve McQueen and his ball and glove, The Great Escape
Spirituality is not just about finding quiet in a noisy world. It is about finding the sacred in the mundane.
Reflection
requires stillness.
One cost of
rushing from thing to thing is that you lose the space to think. Hard work
matters, but nonstop motion often hides a quiet truth: you could have used your
time better.
If you never
pause, you confuse activity with effectiveness. Make time to think. Walk
outside. Sit quietly. Create space. Then move again, but this time on
purpose.
-James Clear, from this episode
Solitude Deprivation: A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.
-Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
Accessing the problem-solving power of your mind is not about pushing; it’s about stopping. Mental processes are at their most effective during times of stillness, but we’ve stopped giving ourselves that opportunity. Because we keep forcing our minds to process, we never give them space to think, and by doing so, we take away their ability to solve.
A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.
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