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Every time I take a trip, the experience acquires meaning and grows deeper only after I get back home and, sitting still, begin to convert the sights I’ve seen into lasting insights.
Our creations come not when we’re out in the world, gathering impressions, but when we’re sitting still, turning those impressions into sentences.
Clouds and blue sky, of course, are how Buddhists explain the nature of our mind: there may be clouds passing across it, but that doesn’t mean a blue sky isn’t always there behind the obscurations. All you need is the patience to sit still until the blue shows up again.
Ricard published a book of photographs that looked to me like the ultimate travel book. He’d been on retreat in a cabin on top of a mountain in Nepal for the better part of a year, and once or twice a week, he’d stepped outside and taken a picture of what lay beyond his front door. The same view, more or less, but as it changed with clouds or rain, in winter or in spring, and as the moods of the man behind the lens changed.
enjoy. From San Quentin to New Delhi, the incarcerated are taught meditation, but only so they can see that within their confinement there may be spots of liberation.
The one thing technology doesn’t provide us with is a sense of how to make the best use of technology. Put another way, the ability to gather information, which used to be so crucial, is now far less important than the ability to sift through it.
It’s easy to feel as if we’re standing two inches away from a huge canvas that’s noisy and crowded and changing with every microsecond. It’s only by stepping farther back and standing still that we can begin to see what that canvas (which is our life) really means, and to take in the larger picture.
people who seem wisest about the necessity of placing limits on the newest technologies are, often, precisely the ones who helped develop those technologies, which have bulldozed over so many of the limits of old. The very people, in short, who have worked to speed up the world are the same ones most sensitive to the virtue of slowing down.
Many in Silicon Valley observe an “Internet Sabbath” every week, during which they turn off most of their devices from, say, Friday night to Monday morning, if only to regather the sense of proportion and direction they’ll need for when they go back online.
Kevin Kelly, one of the most passionate spokesmen for new technologies (and the founding executive editor of Wired magazine), who had written his latest book about how technology can “expand our individual potential” while living without a smartphone, a laptop, or a TV in his home. Kevin still takes off on months-long trips through Asian villages without a computer, so as to be rooted in the nonvirtual world. “I continue to keep the cornucopia of technology at arm’s length,” he writes, “so that I can more easily remember who I am.”
under our control, the clock is exerting more and more tyranny over us. And the more we can contact others, the more, it sometimes seems, we lose contact with ourselves.
Of course, for a religious person, it’s also very much about community and ritual and refreshing one’s relationship with God and ages past.
