Scheduling Quiet Time
I’ve been meditating daily for almost a year, dutifully checking it off the to-do list once I’ve sat quietly, breathing in and out. I usually do this early in the morning, though there are times when I forget or don’t have time, and then I phone it in right before bed, fidgeting around while the meditation app plays just so I can cross it off my list. Look, I did it.
But in ticking off the box, I’ve missed the point. I started out really meditating for the sake of quieting my mind, but I’m now meditating for the sake of completing the task. I know this. I feel it all the time, how I come out of meditation feeling the same way as when I went in.
Clearly, I need to return to meditating for real, but I also really love this idea of scheduling in quiet time. Maybe not the suggested half hour because I just don’t have that kind of time in my life right now if I also want to catch up with Josh, but more than the four minutes the teacher uses in that TED post.
Does it need to be screen-free? The article specifically mentions over and over again that it’s the screen that’s creating this monkey-mind, but… I think about the time that I spend reading blogs. I’m not jumping around, feeling frantic. That’s me time. That’s quiet time and thinking time. I’ll admit that reading on the phone means that I’m more likely to stop reading and start playing Farm Heroes, but sometimes the judgment of screens feels like old quotes you hear about other technological advances, such as bound books or telephones. It’s not going to ruin us any more than telegraphs ruined us. Telegraphs didn’t ruin us… right? Or maybe it did, but this will ruin us in the same way.
Anyway, I put a 15 minute alarm on my phone so I’ll remember to take 15 minutes to read or write or think. Maybe sometimes read blogs, other times read books. Whatever makes me feel quiet.
Do you schedule in quiet time or just grab it where you can find it?
3 comments
My quiet time is just time when I’m not accomplishing tasks. I can be reading, playing games on the phone or computer, watching TV or movies – anything. And I do that every day, because I need it, usually for 2 hours. But I’m lucky in that I don’t have a kid that’s involved in a lot of activities. I hate those nights when we have to go somewhere after I get home from work.
My quiet time is usually only the 5-10 minutes before I fall asleep, unless I set aside time to meditate at lunch for 10 minutes. (I don’t really count the time before my sons go to bed and my own bedtime — which I generally spend watching what my husband chooses on TV while surfing Fac.eb.ook or playing games on my phone, or sometimes reading — as “quiet time.”)
This prompted memories of high school for me, when we often had a prescribed daily “quiet time,” although in our case that meant a very specific set of activities including Bible reading, journaling, and specific kinds of prayer. But this helps me reflect on how those quiet times probably benefited me more than I realized, and more than I believed it did when I stopped doing it. Drawing a connecting line between this practice now and my practice then. Thank you for writing about this.