“Dolce far niente.”
“What does that mean?”
“Oh, it’s a saying we have in Italy: How sweet to do nothing.”
“Well, you’re in America now and they can pull you in for that.”
“Oh, poor Americans.”
— Sophia Loren & Cary Grant — Houseboat (1958)

Our new level of connectedness is a wonderful thing — perhaps the greatest blessing technology has brought us. But it has created a new problem. In this hyper-connected world, time in which you can do nothing is rare.

Despite how highly I value and seek out serenity, I am linked continuously to my workplace and other obligations, so it’s all too easy to feel pressured by the things I could be doing — like Fran in Black Books, cursing under her breath while answering her cell phone as she’s running late for yoga.

The seeds were planted centuries ago with the Puritan work ethic — epitomized by Isaac Watt’s 1700s hymn for children praising the worker bee, which includes the lines:

In works of labour or of skill,
I would be busy too;
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.

The industrial age created even more busyness. And since Houseboat was released, we’ve had the Information Age, “greed is good” and “time is money.” And in just the last two decades, the game has changed again with mobile devices and the internet.

So, as we head into the lazy days of summer, I want to put our focus on: doing nothing.

Doing nothing on retreat

Going on retreat has become a part of the spiritual materialism so rampant today. Goal-oriented achievers schedule in time to acquire a skill, or relieve stress. The grown-up equivalent of science camp, these thousand-dollar mini-vacations may offer both useful training and some immediate relief. But the idea of a goal-oriented retreat is an oxymoron. To “retreat” means to “pull back.” Goal-oriented pulling back?

If you want to do an educational weekend workshop, have at it. But don’t confuse that with a true retreat, which offers a much more important spiritual benefit. When you are on retreat just to be present, then everything that’s due when you return — the bills, service commitments, the “need” to research this and buy that — can fall away.

When I stumbled on this journal entry, which I wrote years ago on a retreat, it reminded me of that precious weightlessness you can feel when the problems of your life and world are lifted, even if just for a weekend:

I’m just here to be here. The agenda is to be at sessions, and then pray or meditate or walk the grounds or nap. Nothing needs to be accomplished. So, despite the fact that silence, a slow pace, modest demands on my attention, are normal for me, this still feels different. Because at home, even when I’m doing morning prayers, or devoting a whole day to service, there are many other things waiting to be done, many things that could be done and maybe, just maybe, should be done. Here, that’s gone. It’s like a vacation, but the purpose is not to be free to play in the surf but to be free to hear God. And this reminds me that despite my good setup at home, it’s still easy to make too much noise in my head to hear that quiet voice.

Meditation, vacations and retreats are not about the immediate relief they may offer. In different ways, they are all about doing nothing. The notion that keeping busy is the only way to avoid temptation is also at the root of some Christians’ mistrust of meditation. But the paradox is that by having no goal, you achieve something wonderful — something potentially transformative. You create space — physical and mental space — to truly decompress and become more open to God’s love.

Doing nothing at home

Once, when I worked in my hometown of New York but lived outside the city, I was caught in town in a blizzard and had to stay in a hotel. I remember those few days as a peak moment in my life. Why? Why were those two days so different from the thousands of others in the same place before and since? Because I felt entitled to do nothing productive. Nothing was expected of me, required of me. Despite being just 50 miles from home and on familiar turf, I had no way to attend to things that might need doing. It was as if I was on vacation.

But back when that happened, few people had cell phones and I wasn’t one of them, and though I did have email, I would have needed a desktop computer and a modem to get at it; so if, as with that blizzard, I wasn’t at my home or office, I was unreachable. In a similar situation today, I’d be answering emails, texts, voicemails and Facebook messages on my iPhone, and editing and publishing articles on my iPad anywhere there was a 3G signal.

This doesn’t mean we can’t find freedom from demands. We just have to be more deliberate these days. How do you recreate my blizzard experience in this hyper-connected age? It’s simple, but it’s not easy. It means breaking some patterns and ignoring what people around you might think. It’s hard not to feel guilty doing nothing when the whole society is obsessed with measuring productivity.

Cardinal Egan once said that the greatest gift we give another person is our time, being present to them. Give yourself that gift. Take some time to have no purpose but to be with yourself. And if you have a family, also take time to be with them. My childhood camping trips were so precious partly because we were together with no agenda. (Other than my father’s insane daily mileage goals, that is.)

So, go on that tour of medieval churches in Italy. Go to that workshop. Those are wonderful things. But also consider a real retreat, where the only goal is to be there; the only activities, to pray, walk in the woods, and perhaps listen to talks.

In your daily routine at home, create time to do nothing — sacred time for you and God. Consider the ancient Judeo-Christian tradition — one of the Ten Commandment, no less! — of a real full day of rest, an entire day with no obligations other than your faith practice and being with family.

The sidebar on the right has some suggestions for how to create space to do nothing in your life.

And I want to hear from you! How do you carve out space to do nothing? Has a time when you did nothing enriched your spiritual practice? Share your tips and experiences in comments below.

[This column was originally published on July 27, 2009.]

Fra Angelico's The Conversion of St. Augustine (my patron saint)

I’ve been taken aback these last few weeks by all the retrospectives and their universal declaration that the “aughts” were an awful decade. Objectively, it’s hard to argue as they trot out disaster after disaster, setback after setback. And when pressed, I recall that as the decade began I had a six-figure salary at a high-flying dot-com, millions to come with the genuinely likely public offering, and a beautiful girlfriend. I had none of those things within a few years. But I need to be reminded of the losses and setbacks and derailed career, because my perception of the story line of the decade is entirely different. For me the aughts weren’t awful; they were awesome.

You see, for me the key events of the decade are: reclaiming my sobriety, my conversion and baptism, and feeling and answering the call to return to writing, with a new focus on spiritual work. The past decade has in many ways been the most joyous of my life. It has been a period of spiritual growth, of expanding community, and of a radically increased sense of usefulness and purpose.

There’s an obvious connection here. As I said in my column, “Losing your footing and finding the ground“, losing the material things that define our lives can shake us into adjusting our focus, our priorities.

But mine is not a neat and tidy conversion story of: “My life was pointless and painful, then I found God, and now everything is rosy.” For me, the life stripped away by the dot-com bubble burst and 9/11 did matter and, in many ways, was good. I looked forward to going to work every morning and figuring out how to bring more music into people’s lives. My work was both creative and challenging. I lost a good thing. And the same was certainly true of my relationship.

My challenges to you for the new year and new decade:

 

Make your own day, week, year and decade — and, ultimately, life. Don’t let other people tell you that you should be unhappy, or happy. Experience and honor what happens; just don’t let it define you.

Enhance your connection with God. Instead of chasing after symptoms, go to the root. In the year ahead, explore new ways to bring yourself into closer union with God and focus on Love.

Once was lost but now am found

There is a different conversion story arc that does apply: the one found in the Luke 15 parables of the Prodigal Son — “this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” — and the lost sheep — “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost” — and in Psalm 119, “I have gone astray like a lost sheep.” Or as it’s rendered in “Amazing Grace”:

I once was lost but now am found.
Was blind, but now I see.

A frequent metaphor in both Christian and Hebrew scripture is the path or way, straying from the path, losing one’s way. The Hebrew word “shub,” often translated as repent, literally means to return. “Convert” comes from the Latin, meaning to turn around. Our internal compass knows which direction leads home; we need to decide to follow it.

Or clear our vision so we can see it. Throughout the mystical literature of many different traditions, you find the metaphors of being asleep or dead or blind, and the potential of awakening or being reborn or seeing. I have spent much of my life sleepwalking, not fully alive, lost, so to speak. Wonderful gifts have come and gone, and I’ve enjoyed them, and I’ve mostly been good to others. But it was all through a haze of disconnection. In the 00′s, I woke up; I reconnected; I found God and myself; and through this I became a new person; I was reborn.

It’s not that I never sensed the divine before that. As I’ve recounted before in bits and pieces, I have been practicing Centering Prayer since the early 90s; I’ve been a regular member of a Christian church since before that, a lay leader even; I’ve stood in awe of the divine in nature — the fragile warbler and the overwhelming redwood, the otherworldly octopus and the common housecat. But these were glimpses.

What I lacked then was a regular sense of connection, communion, a sense of groundedness. I feel alive now, and I experience the connectedness as love — the sense that no matter what happens, the world is ultimately driven by Love and that we’re all connected through this love, to one another and to God.

Choosing what matters

Now this is where it gets tricky. Because in a sense, what I’m saying is that if you choose to see the world as good, it will be good for you, and if you choose to see it as bad, it will be bad for you. I’ve encouraged you here before to turn off the news. This is not denial. It’s choosing what to focus on. Watching the news is letting someone else tell you what matters.

This is what matters to me: friends and loved ones; people I am helping stay sober and others to whom I’m giving spiritual counsel one-on-one or through writing; cultivating love and beauty in my life through connections with people and nature and quiet contemplation; the Centering Prayer group I lead; you, dear readers; and all the myriad ups and downs of daily life — mine and my friends’ — what Ani DiFranco once described as “the quaint tragedies we invent and then undo, the stupid circumstances we slalom through.”

My New Year’s challenges to you

So, here’s my first New Year’s challenge to you: Make your own day, week, year and decade — and, ultimately, life. Don’t let other people tell you that you should be unhappy. To hell with them, because that’s where they already are. Milton said in Paradise Lost:

“The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

We are surrounded by people who are choosing to be miserable. And who will tell you why you should be too. Ignore them.

And don’t listen when people tell you that you should be happy either. If there’s a tragedy in your life, by all means mourn; let go at your own speed. If there’s an injustice in your world, work to right it. If you experience a dark night of the soul, don’t cover it up with platitudes, work through it to deepen your faith. Just don’t let these things define you. Honor them, and then turn your attention to ways you can be useful and enhance your connection to God.

And that’s the underlying challenge that will inform the first, and make it easy: Enhance your connection with God. Instead of chasing after symptoms, go to the root. In the year ahead, explore new ways to bring yourself into closer union with God — whether it be through contemplation or working with others; in your faith community, at your workplace, with friends, within your family or in solitude. Whatever and wherever, look for new ways to quiet the clamors of the material world and focus on what really matters: Love.

Happy New Year, readers. Let’s make the decade to come awesome, for each of us individually and for the world!

[Actual 9/23/09 WABC-NY local news tease at 10:32 p.m.]
At 11, we follow the food to local restaurants and our investigation could take your appetite away! [video of bloody meat being handled unsanitarily] … An act of love or murder — why did a man shoot his wife of more than 50 years? [video of body bag being removed from building] … And, he stopped for a bag of ice at a corner store, but he never saw this coming. [video — no joke — of a pedestrian being slammed into in a parking lot by an SUV]

I don’t mean to put anyone out of work in this difficult economy — I even have several friends in this profession — but I implore you to turn off the news and leave it off. Mainly, I want you to turn off the local news, where “if it bleeds, it leads” and the priority, after titillating you with gore, is to scare you — because they thrive if we think we have to watch or we’ll die.

There are a number of reasons I recommend turning off the news. First, life is stressful enough already. Who needs this? Second, if you are powerless over something, there’s usually no benefit in worrying about it. Third, exposing yourself regularly to the ugliest aspects of society darkens and coarsens your view of other people, which takes you away from compassion and love, and thus away from God. It undermines your spiritual fitness.

Rather than helping us better to mourn — to see the suffering in the world with an open heart — watching the news regularly hardens our hearts. In order to face so much suffering with no option of relevant action, we detach from it; we tune it out, if you will.

Consider taking this challenge:

Don’t watch the news for two weeks. If that’s unacceptable to you, at least avoid the local news and reduce your other news watching.

Then answer these questions:

1. Did you notice a sense of relief at being “allowed” to not keep up with the news?

2. Did you develop new rituals or new patterns around the things you used to do while watching news — like eating dinner, or waking up in the morning, or driving?

3. Did you notice that you learned about news that was of interest to you anyway, through other sources, and could then look into those things more fully on a case-by-case basis?

4. Did you miss out on anything you could have done something about, or did you simply not find out about things that didn’t affect your life, which you didn’t miss knowing?

5. Did you notice a change in your general anxiety or negativity levels?

6. Did turning off the news make room for something else to come up, a new awareness of something in your life, a breakthrough in discernment or spiritual growth?

I’d rather you turn off the nightly network news too. It’s only a better written and less sensationalistic rendition of the same principles — replace food safety scares and neighborhood murders with flu epidemics and terrorism. (The 24-hour news channels present a different problem. In order to fill all that time, they invent conflict, scandal and crisis to have something to talk about.) If you must, a weekly recap show is sufficient. Better yet, read the Sunday paper. (Hey, they could use the sales.)

I’m not anti-TV. I watch plenty of TV. Television is still the main mode of mass communication in our culture. Entertainment shows help us relax and escape; sometimes even challenge us to think. Documentaries and talk shows, at their best, educate us and build a sense of community and connectedness.

You won’t miss anything important

If you are really concerned about missing something important, don’t be. You’ll hear about it. For years now, the way information is disseminated has been shifting from a top-down route through a handful of gatekeepers at the newspapers and networks to a diffused model — first with cable TV and then exploding thanks to the internet.

In just the last few years, a whole new even more decentralized mode of news distribution has appeared thanks to social networking and pervasive connectedness. Today, people receive a substantial amount of their news through non-news sources at any time of the day and in any location — directly, through friends’ text messages and emails, and indirectly, from blogs, Facebook statuses and Twitter tweets. The office water cooler is now everywhere. “Push” — an unrealized technology concept of the 90s — has finally arrived: the things you’re interested in are pushed to you; you don’t have to tune in at a specific time or go to a specific place.

Why watch the news?

Instead of asking the question, “Why turn off the news?” I want you to ask yourself a different question, “Why watch the news?” Take a minute and think about that. Most people’s knee-jerk response would be some variation on, “I need to know.” But why? And what? Do you need to know about the bloody crime that was committed last night a mile from your home?

To that, someone might throw up the argument, “I need to be vigilant and aware that there’s a killer in the neighborhood — this information is relevant to my safety.” Hogwash. Unless you know the victim — in which case, you’d probably already know about the crime — then you are just as safe or just as at risk whether you know about it or not. Unless of course it’s a serial killer targeting someone like you. But how often is that the case? For me, never. And even in that remotest of likelihoods, do you need to see crime scene footage?

So this idea that you need to know about local crime for your own safety is garbage. Then there’s the pure entertainment value some people get from the danger and violence. I don’t think I need to explain why that’s problematic. Or the illogical sense of satisfaction or relief people get from seeing that harm befell others and not them — “Thank goodness that didn’t happen to me,” or “That would never happen to me. I’m smarter than that.”

The illusion of control

Why else might it serve you to know? Now we get into the realm of more spiritual matters. The main reason people think they need to know things is for the illusion of control over them. If I am up to speed on a situation, it creates a sense of mastery, a sense that I’m going to be able to handle it.

You don’t have to be afraid of the unknown — because you’ve created the illusion that it’s known. But you don’t really have control, so this doesn’t allay the underlying anxiety.

This is not the same as saying “ignorance is bliss.” That expression suggests that knowledge is possible and one is staying ignorant to deny the truth. This is not about denying the truth. It’s about choosing one’s reality. Do you want to focus on all the negative things in your world, or the positive ones? Ignorance may not be bliss, but information without wisdom can mean suffering.

Of course, there are times when one should pay attention to the news. When there is literally a crisis occurring, it might be helpful. When there is a national issue in which your input is possible, such as elections, or something like the current health care debate, you want to play your part. But these are specific issues for which you can tune in or visit websites at specific times. Or at least you can watch the news only while these situations are occurring.

Otherwise, I want you to consider turning off the news altogether. In the sidebar, I make a few suggestions. Share your experiences with trying them out, or if you already skip the news, tell me what motivated you to make that decision, so counter to the culture we live in. I’d love to hear your reasons. Leave a comment below or email me at phil (at) bustedhalo.com.