A few years ago, I went to a ten-day Tibetan Buddhist retreat in a lovely rural area of Wisconsin. My wife was well practiced in Buddhist meditation and, for many years, had set aside twenty minutes a day for the activity. I had been trying it out now and then. Finally, I decided to give myself over to the experience at a bona fide retreat center. So I carved out a chunk from my schedule and headed for Wisconsin.
Each day, we participants sat through seven or eight hours of guided meditation, broken up by meals. For the rest of the time, we read, took long walks, and just abided alone with our thoughts. There was little else to do. The center had not orchestrated other activities. I don’t recall seeing any laptops or smartphones. None of us attempted to contact our workplaces or glance at our to-do lists. The meditation center itself was sprawled out in the middle of nowhere—surrounded by miles of farmland punctuated only by the occasional wood farmhouse and a few wandering cows.
Meditation is a beautiful and profound experience. While meditating, you quiet your mind as much as possible. You focus on the moment. When random thoughts arise, as they invariably do, you learn not to dwell on them but simply to acknowledge them and let them go, like momentary ripples on a lake. Needless to say, while meditating you are off the grid. You are free from the stimulation of the external world. You have dedicated a few minutes to stillness of mind.
Although the methodology has not always been of uniform quality, numerous studies have suggested the physical and psychological benefits of meditation. To mention only one recent study, psychologists Ruth Baer, Emily Lykins, and Jessica Peters at the University of Kentucky and Eastern Kentucky University reported that the “psychological wellbeing” of seventy-seven regular meditators was significantly better than that of seventy-five non-meditators. Psychological well-being was measured on a scale with six elements: self-acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, and personal growth. Biologist and leading meditation researcher Jon Kabat-Zinn and his collaborators have observed physical alterations in the brain produced by mindfulness meditation.
I found the meditation sessions to be restful, interesting, and valuable as a tool for reducing stress. But meditation is only one way of distancing yourself from the rush and heave of the world. Whatever psychological benefit I received from meditating during my ten days in Wisconsin, I derived an equal benefit from the quiet time outside the meditation room. Downtime. My mind was unleashed. And instead of trying to empty my mind, as one does in meditation, and letting my thoughts drift by like moving clouds, I followed my thoughts, but in an unhurried and liberated way. Without setting out to do so, I began sewing together the pieces of my life. I found myself recalling people and places of the past, conversations, words said and unsaid, deeds I was proud of and others I regretted. I remembered the particular moment when I made my maiden voyage on a two-wheeler—a wobbly trip across the front yard, dodging trees—while my father looked on with pride and support. I remembered taking walks with my mother in her last months of life, she wearing a silly feathered hat to cover her newly bald head. Her words to me: “Life is too short to spend time with people you don’t enjoy being with.” I recalled my silent resolution to try to live life so that when my own last moments arrived I would be at peace. I remembered a high school friend who had abruptly stopped answering my letters and phone calls when we reached our forties. With some sleuthing, I confirmed that he was alive and well. I recalled my hurt and my soul-searching for how I might have wounded him, and the final letter I wrote to him apologizing for all that might have gone wrong. Who was I in those blossoming years? Had I misunderstood myself? I played mental movies of my life in other decades, seeing myself outside of myself like a character on a stage. I remembered sounds and scenes, shuffled in time like cards in a deck: standing with a girlfriend in an abandoned railway car in the middle of a grassy field; a grotesque chandelier I’d bought on a whim to hang in my first apartment in Pasadena; Paul McCartney singing “Yesterday”; demonstrating a prism to my ten-year-old daughter by holding it up to a window and pointing to the splash of colors cast on the wall; a thick book lying half open on a table. Large things and small. I found myself mulling over the principles I believed in, other principles I once believed in but had abandoned, what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. My children. My wife.
There was no hurry in these recollections and daydreams. There was no urgency. All these thoughts emerged in a quiet and leisurely manner, like a bubble of air slowly rising to the surface in a still summer pond.
Here are a few sections I wrote in my journal at the time:
I think there are several different goals that motivate people to action:
1. the pure joy of helping others, without expecting anything in return
2. the belief in certain values that require action
3. the desire to have an impact in the world, to make a difference; one can further desire personal credit for having an impact, in which case the ego is involved, or one can seek an impact without any desire to receive personal credit
4. the desire to promote one’s self or achieve personal gain, regardless of whether there is any positive impact on the world
A big issue for me is dealing with disappointments when one of my projects does not have the consequence I hoped for.
For me the big questions about life are:
1. How should I live in the world?
2. Why should I live this way?
One answer to both is that I should live so as to bring myself satisfaction. Satisfaction in and of itself is a worthy goal, because we have only one life (in my opinion), and we might as well be personally satisfied in that one life.
I have wonderful memories of my grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, brothers and cousins, at large family gatherings at my grandparents’ house. These gatherings made me feel warm, safe, protected, in the “bosom of the family.”
What were these musings about? I think they were about the renewal and consolidation of my identity. My time wandering alone in the fields around the retreat center or reading quietly in a vacant chair connected me to myself. I felt that I was revisiting myself, perhaps even revising myself. I felt that I was walking through the rooms of my life and having conversations with all the people I had met there. In those rooms, I met younger versions of myself as well. They were all me, of course, in my childhood and teens and twenties and thirties and on. I could understand them and acknowledge them. I could acknowledge the union of my selves. I could see the center. I felt a deep completeness; my various selves united as one self, sometimes making good decisions, sometimes not good, but always trying to live well in the world, trying to be part of a whole. I could see the fullness of my life, and the aspirations. And the rooms of the future were there as well, with doors slightly ajar, offering glimpses of what I might become in the world ahead of me, the world I could control and the world I could not. I heard the quiet, whispering voice saying, “This is who I am. This is who I want to be. This is my cosmos of being.” In one of her poems, Emily Dickinson compared stillness to a smooth mind. Stillness is what I felt. And my mind was rounding.
Mental downtime is having the space and freedom to wander about the vast hallways of memory and contemplate who we are. Downtime is when we can ponder our past and imagine our future. Downtime is when we can repair our selves. Such renewal differs in some ways from the creative activity discussed in the last chapter. But both require unplugging from the grid. And you don’t have to go to a meditation center in rural Wisconsin to unplug. All you need is time away from the rush and heave of the world. Quiet time. Alone time. And you need a certain habit of mind. You need a regular pattern of thinking and approaching life, a deeply rooted and constant manner of honoring your inner self, affirming your values, and arranging your life so as to live by those values.
In the business world, the technology world, and the computer world, “downtime” is a dirty word. It means a period when the system is not working, when the computers have crashed, when the machines have temporarily ground to a halt. In these contexts, downtime is considered useless time, empty time. But for the lush and mysterious terrain of our minds, downtime is a chance to explore. It is a time to renew. It is also a chance to restore and maintain our equilibrium.
One of the definitions of a living organism, at a primitive level, involves the ability to separate itself from its surroundings and create a stable and orderly environment within itself. That stable equilibrium is called homeostasis. An organism receives outside stimulation—indeed, it must receive, at a minimum, energy from the exterior world—but it needs to regulate that stimulation and maintain a coherent and stable interior. The organism separates itself from the outer world with some kind of outer membrane. It lets certain materials inside itself through that membrane but not others. And it expels some materials through that membrane. Through all these processes, the organism must remain whole. The organism cannot dissolve. It cannot merge with its surroundings. Its interior parts must understand what they are supposed to do (at least at the biochemical level) and proceed with their designated activities.
Homeostasis can happen at the mindless level of an amoeba. Or at the more advanced level of a human being. And at that more advanced level, I suggest that there is a kind of necessary homeostasis of the mind: not a static equilibrium but a dynamic equilibrium in which we are constantly examining, testing, and replenishing our mental system, constantly securing the mental membrane between ourselves and the external world, constantly reorganizing and affirming ourselves. Dynamic rather than static because the outside world is constantly changing, and we ourselves are constantly changed by it. And yet we must maintain an equilibrium in the face of change. We cannot disintegrate. We cannot succumb to the random noise of the world. We must constantly examine who we are, revise when revision is needed, and bring coherency to all the parts of our whole.
Downtime enables not only our creativity and our need for rest. It also enables the formation and maintenance of our deep sense of being and identity. The great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung discussed identity in terms of the Self, which he pictured as a circle. For Jung, the Self was the result of integrating one’s life experiences into a whole—but a whole distinct from its surroundings, as in the biological understanding of homeostasis.
The need to nourish the Self, the need for some kind of equilibrium and homeostasis within ourselves and our immediate environment, must be buried deep in our psyche, going back to our most primitive origins. Yet in the hyperconnected, overstimulated, and time-driven world of today, we are often far from equilibrium. We often lack the time and space for personal reflection. We lack the mental quiet and privacy to create a necessary inner stability.
I would suggest that the absence of downtime works on our bodies and minds in the same way as does sleep deprivation. One of the first experimental studies of sleep deprivation was done by the Russian physician and scientist Maria Mikhailovna Manaseina. In 1894, Manaseina reported that young dogs deprived of sleep died within a few days. Her experiments were repeated a few years later with older dogs by the Italian physiologists Lamberto Daddi and Giulio Tarozzi, with the same results. These researchers were not able to attribute the cause of death to lack of food or physical exhaustion. Even today, the function of sleep is not fully understood. But many scientists feel that the quiet of sleep, without external stimulation and stress, is needed to rejuvenate mental processes as well as to repair muscles and tissues. Sleep is an opportunity for the mind, freed from the noise of the waking world, to take stock. Such accounting is critically important to organize the zillions of sensory and mental experiences that bombard us each day.
Without downtime, we might not physically die, but we will die psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. In downtime, not only are we making sense of the events of the day, we are making sense of our lives. We are combing through the thousands of hours and days of our lives to find those experiences and thoughts that have personal meaning to us, that speak to us, sometimes in that quiet, whispering voice.