The Joy Of Quiet

This past year, I've been following an Internet Sabbath: One day a week I turn off my cellphone and e-mail, and spend some time alone to reflect on the past week and visualize the next one. Although I've experienced substantial benefits from this, I haven't been able to pin down exactly why. This thought-provoking piece in The New York Times attempts to do so:

That after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.

It's only by taking some time off from the world that you can reflect upon what you should be doing with it. When i spend enough time alone (typically 3-6 hours), I can detect the voices inside my head -- the ones that remind me of an email to send, or a potential response to friend --  gradually dying down. This is a good thing: It means I'm getting at the roots of my thoughts. Any paradigm change, any deep change in how I view the people and projects around me, happens here, during this slow, deliberate, process. This piece, titled The Power of Lonely, explains why:  

When we let our focus shift away from the people and things around us, we are better able to engage in what’s called meta-cognition, or the process of thinking critically and reflectively about our own thoughts.

For me, though, my Sabbath doesn't only consist of virtual seclusion. It also entails physical seclusion. While spending time with others is conducive to better performance (and it's more fun), it's not conducive to figuring out my thoughts, or changing them, which is one of my goals during a Sabbath.

Other psychologists have looked at what happens when other people’s minds don’t just take up our bandwidth, but actually influence our judgment. It’s well known that we’re prone to absorb or mimic the opinions and body language of others in all sorts of situations, including those that might seem the most intensely individual, such as who we’re attracted to. While psychologists don’t necessarily think of that sort of influence as “clouding” one’s judgment — most would say it’s a mechanism for learning, allowing us to benefit from information other people have access to that we don’t — it’s easy to see how being surrounded by other people could hamper a person’s efforts to figure out what he or she really thinks of something.

Though it's hard to fathom -- and harder still to explain to friends -- it's precisely this time away from loved ones that makes me so much more empathetic, creative, and thoughtful when I'm with them. 

For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year — often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them.