HELLO JI!
A WORD (OR TWO HUNDRED) FROM THE EDITOR
Image credit: ALI KIRCCHINBAUER on Unsplash.
I recently came across Maria Popova’s blog, Brain Pickings. Late to the party (she has millions of readers) I was fascinated by what the young lady has to say. A Google search reveals that she is a Bulgarian-born American writer who has found wide appeal. Brain Pickings features her writing on books and ideas from the arts, philosophy, culture, and other subjects.
While pursuing higher education, she became disenchanted with rote memorization and standardized testing that placed a greater emphasis on “accumulation of information rather than cultivation of wisdom”. She read everything from philosophy to astrophysics and her “cross-disciplinarian curiosity” led to the creation of her blog which is archived in the Library of Congress as culturally valuable material.
Links to her talks include one on 7 Life Learnings in which she says she spends much of her day reading, thinking about what she has read and writing about it. One of the learnings she shares is on what she describes as pockets of stillness.
Meditate, she says. Go for walks, ride a bike to nowhere in particular. “There’s a creative process to daydreaming and even boredom”.
Where was Maria, I wondered, when we were trying to instill pockets of stillness in our sons years ago? Of course, we didn’t call it that. Known as our “unplugged family vacations” they weren’t wildly popular. My husband talked about letting the mind float free. They rolled their eyes. How would they survive without gadgets they were so attached to that they were almost appendages? By reading, going for long walks, for a swim, playing badminton or Scrabble, or even just taking a nap in a hammock, we said. Anything, really, that didn’t involve being tethered to technology. The initial reluctance gave way to a grudging acknowledgement that the idea wasn’t half as bad as they feared.
According to media reports, the federal labour minister was in consultations with experts over the need to give workers the “right to disconnect” and avoid work emails and text messages outside of business hours. First adopted in France in 2016, the idea has gained value in recent times with more of us working from home than ever before.
People who could once “shut shop” and head home find that they can now be hauled back into work-mode with the beep of a phone. Leaving little or no time for pockets of stillness in which ideas germinate.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was prescient:
Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs –
To the silent wilderness
Where the soul need not repress
Its music lest it should not find
An echo in another’s mind,
While the touch of Nature’s art
Harmonizes heart to heart.”
Shagorika Easwar