It’s a lot harder than it seems to do nothing; to not distract ourselves. A couple of years ago, I read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I wanted to cultivate my creative self. I was game for all the exercises, and I performed them like the good student I am: morning pages, artist’s dates, ten tiny changes, lists of people I admire, of friends who nourish me, of buried dreams. I threw things out to open space for newness to enter.
When I got to the section titled “Reading deprivation,” though, I said no fucking way. Absolutely not. If I have to stop reading in order to tap into creativity, I’d rather not be creative. I actually felt sick to my stomach when I read the assignment. There’s no way I will give up reading.
At the same time, she’s not wrong.
It is a paradox that by emptying our lives of distractions we are actually filling the well. Without distractions, we are once again thrust into the sensory world.
– Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
These days, it feels like it only takes seconds for us to distract ourselves in order to avoid boredom. Sometimes I look over at my husband on the couch and he’s just sitting with a cat on his lap, looking at her and petting her. Not scrolling his phone, not reading. This seems miraculous to me. When I’m sitting almost anywhere, even when I have a cat in my lap that I’m petting, my brain is otherwise occupied, usually reading a book, a short story, Slack, or texts. Sometimes I’m doing the crossword, and sometimes I write. But almost always, I am in my head, not my body.
I wrote recently that I wanted to start a prayer practice. I didn’t really know how to begin, so I began by doing nothing, but with intention. The first couple of days, I settled on a cushion on our bedroom floor, cracked open our window so I could hear the birds, and sat still for 10 minutes. Instead of closing my eyes like I do in meditation, I kept my eyes open. I wanted to appreciate the fluttering green of wind in the leaves, the blue sky, the rust-breasted robins hopping, the goldfinches swooping. I focused my attention on each of my senses. My attentiveness was my prayer. It was an appreciation of being a physical being in a physical world.
When we visited sunny Florida, I got to do the same thing, but sitting on the sand under the sky with the sound of sea waves swishing. I felt both emptied and filled. Scoured and cleaned and filled back up. I bought myself a little prayer journal and started writing an appreciation each day.
In Georgia, my room had a big window that faced east, where the sun rose over the Atlantic. I did sun salutations each morning to greet the day. These, and walking on the beach without headphones, were my prayers.
I picked up another idea in Georgia, too, when my mom told me she starts each day with meditation and prayer. I asked how she prays, and she said, especially after surviving cancer, she has a list of people she holds in the light. She prays to lift them up. Yesterday when I was back in my own room, seated on my cushion on the floor, I held people in the light.
I’m reading a beautiful book right now, Stone Yard Devotional, about a woman who leaves her life behind and becomes a nun, despite never really intending to become a nun. She didn’t believe in God. She just needed a break and went to this religious community in rural Australia for the quiet it offered. And then ended up staying.
When she arrived, she didn’t know how to pray, and in fact had a “juvenile” notion of it. Sister Simone lost patience with her:
Forget this telephone line to God bullshit, she snapped, hot with impatience. It wasn’t even about God, she said, which I thought must surely be blasphemous. Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking.
Sister Simone said something beautiful that I underlined in my book and find myself looking at nearly every day.
“We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will… Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”
It’s not easy to be still. It’s not easy to pay attention. I’m working on it. But not by depriving myself of books.
Butterfly Mind 