An hour a day for 60 days
At the tail end of last year, I bought and read the same book twice. The book was called 4000 Weeks, the subheading, Time Management for Mortals. I originally discovered the book due to the reading of a chapter on the Time Ferris Podcast. The podcast host waxed lyrical about the profound impact that the book and this chapter had on him. I listened to the chapter, was similarly intrigued and about halfway through stopped and immediately bought the audiobook version. I began to listen to this, while I went on to order the physical copy from Amazon, with prime expediated delivery mind you. I listened until the physical copy arrived, where I went back to the beginning of the book and began devouring the book.
The book is simple in its message. We humans of the developed world, live our lives as if we are instruments of society, determined to maximize the use of our time for things deemed productive. Like many, I have been guilty of this a thousand and one times. Every now and then I would read something like Four Thousand Weeks, change my behavior short term, before racing back to old habits of under sleeping, overworking and overtraining. Like many, the allure of the ‘Hustle’ culture is something that resonates with a deeply rooted element of my ‘A type personality’. YouTube shorts of a gang of various Hustle Guru’s tell me how hard I should be working if I want to be just like them, if I want to be happy. They are salesman, one and all, and whatever they are selling, I am buying. So I wake up before five, meditate, write, stretch or train, shower, brush my teeth before racing off to a day at work, all the while berating myself for taking several breaks during my routine, losing those precious eight minutes that have now caused me to be late.
These habitual behaviors followed by engrained thought habits, while giving the appearance of being healthy, are hollow and lack any meaning. Discipline is relative. You can be a disciplined serial killer. It is neither good nor bad, it just is. It is something our society deeply values, where that comes from, I don’t know, but I think it is something that we could use a little less of.
I’m not going to give you a breakdown of the prescriptions that Burkman gives at the end of the book, you can read the book. What the book did for me is the important part; it made me really think about my relationship with time. This, by the way, was the purpose of the book.
I didn’t really know where to start when I finally did finish the book. Many of the beliefs that I had about time were challenged. If we weren’t doing something with our time, then what was the point of having it. We are constantly in between doing things, never able to settle into the time we are having for fear that we may lose track of time and miss our next commitment. This is surely not what we are here to do with the limited time that we have. There must be a better way than racing through life. Rush, rush, rush.
I needed to do something that would knock me off course, out of the groove that I had settled into.
I had been a meditator for several years, on and off for the most part, never settling into a particular style or routine. Dabbling would be the best way to describe my habit. At its core meditation is really getting as close to doing nothing as possible. It is a true recognition of one’s experience moment to moment generally mediated by a ultimately meaningless focus on the breath, mantra or anything else that allows the mind become aware of itself. In my mind, sitting still and being aware seemed as close as possible to doing nothing that I could muster.
I wanted to also extend myself into an uncomfortable range of doing nothing. An hour seemed appropriate. I had heard of Naval Ravikant’s prescription of an hour of meditation a day for 60 days. 60 for 60. That seemed like a substantial enough chunk of time. Naval also recommends a style of meditation that is called Choiceless Awareness, where one does not attempt to focus their thoughts in any particular direction. There is no focus on the breathing, or on bodily sensations, nor is there a kaon or question that someone is trying to untangle, simply sit and whatever comes up, comes up.
I decided that for me the best way to do this would be right at the start of the day, starting the day with what I considered the most imperative directive, to do nothing for an hour at the start of every day.
The first week was surprisingly easy. I found myself waiting for moments to switch the position of my legs. I would find myself drinking the water I kept beside myself, almost as a way to take myself away from the experience. For the most part though, the minutes would slowly drip away and eventually the alarm that I set for myself, marking the end of the hour, would sound and I could begin my day. There were no profound insights, into my nature or the nature of man, nor were there any bliss experiences, it was just a quiet if slightly bland experience of sitting alone in a room, paying attention to myself.
It was the second week where things started to drag. I would say that about day ten my thoughts began to stray into the territory of how this time could have been spent in a better way. At least when I was stretching or exercising there was a point to the time that I was using. This was pointless, a selfish endeavor of laziness. Sitting and doing nothing. I was aware that this was a sophisticated form of trying to get out of the experiment, the productivity junkie inside of me doing his best to sow seeds of distrust in my own opinions, so I stuck it out. I paid attention to how long each ten-minute block would take. I allowed myself to check the clock sporadically and could be amazed at how long seven minutes could feel like. Time seemed to stretch, the way it does as you wait for things, like the appointment at a specific time, or the dinner that night you are excited about. Except I was now just looking forward to doing anything that could relieve me from this experience of nothingness.
I think we as humans need to do things to justify to ourselves that we exist. Proving this to ourselves is also not quite good enough, we want to prove it to others. We might be able to trick ourselves into the fact that we exist, but surely we wouldn’t be able to trick other people. It speaks to deep seeded need for somethingness, that we cannot take a moment to appreciate the nothingness that is always right there.
For two weeks I sat without any enjoyment. I would occasionally drop into periods of bliss or peace, only to tear myself out of it the moment I recognized it and then immediately check the clock to see only four minutes had passed. There were dozens of times that I sat and though how stupid this was, how ridiculous it was that I was sitting here, wasting away the precious minutes that I had, doing nothing. I don’t really know why I kept going to be completely honest. One of the reasons might have been that I told a few people about what I was doing. Nothing crazy, just my partner and another close friend who enjoys these sorts of self-experiments. This need for approval and the thought that I may pull out, might have been the only thing that kept me in. Sometimes, you can use the ego.
It wasn’t until the early thirties of days that this malaise began to clear and I was truly able to drop into the experience and begin to enjoy things again. There is a phrase that pops up in the meditation/mindfulness community constantly, ‘letting go ‘meaning letting go of expectations and pre conceived ideas about what mindfulness and meditation is and how it should feel. We all have expectations on how things should be, ranging from things as basic as how water should taste to things as complex as how long our drive to work should take. Sitting and breathing, being an activity that is supposedly simple, is going to have a huge amount of expectation attached to it. We just know that it is going to be boring, or peaceful or blissful, or something in between. At the thirty day mark I think I let these expectations drop. The experience just was. I sat and breathed and occasionally thought deeply about things, all sorts of things. There were times that I thought about work. There were times I thought about the depth of my breath. There were times I thought about the pregnancy of my wife. There were times I thought about the money and death and taxes. The thoughts came and went. Sometimes I would become attached to them and ruminate on them for a twenty minutes, allowing the loops of thought to play out, allowing them time to get whatever they needed to tell me, out of my system.
This is how it went on for the remainder of the month. I discovered a couple of small tricks that I could do to manage some of the more troubling impulses to activity or obsessive thoughts.
1. If a thought was something actionable, as in there was something troubling me that I could actively change, I would write a quick note in a notepad that I had beside me. I.e. Buy logbook for car or; email so and so. I had an hour so me taking ten seconds to write a quick note was only a snippet of the time, that managed to give me countless minutes of relief from an annoying and ultimately pointless thought.
Just as a note on this. I would not turn this hour into a process of journaling. Journaling is something, we are trying to do nothing. So try and keep your sitting to one or two notes maximum. Use it as a release valve, not to be overused.
2. If you need to pee. Pee. If your legs are uncomfortable, change position, go and grab a different chair. This is not supposed to be elongated torture. This is supposed to be doing nothing, not enduring. I would recommend trying to sit up straight, so that you don’t nod off. But then again, who am I to stop you from sleeping. If you find yourself nodding off, then perhaps that is exactly what you need. I was attempting to sit and do nothing, but perhaps you might need a little more rest.
3. Bring water. Sip away. Pretty easy, nothing worse than being thirsty.
4. You don’t have to meditate. I meditated because I had experience with the activity, but you don’t have to. If you prefer sitting and thinking, allowing your mind to wander, that’s fine. Just sit there and let your mind wander. Try and pay attention to what it is that you’re thinking about. You do not need a practice of breath watching or mantra repeating. Just sit and relax.
That’s all there is too it really. Take an hour out of your day, or half if you can’t spare any more and relax.
I suppose I should give some rational to the benefits of this practice. At all times we are changing our understanding and relationship to our lived experience, whether that is sitting meditating doing drugs or any other activity that we enjoy or dislike. We add flavor to the meal of our lives. This does the same thing. If I were a little more of a spiritually minded individual, perhaps I would write that I was cultivating a new spaciousness to my consciousness, or bringing a deeper awareness to my Self. I did not feel like I was doing either of those things. It became a relaxing experience, where I felt like I had the time to work through ideas that may have been troubling me. I suddenly had the permission to actually try and meditate. Blocking out twenty minutes never seemed to be enough. I would finally reach a certain settlement of mind before the alarm would go off and I would enter back into the mindset of do, do, do, do.
The question arose throughout was : How do we truly experience doing anything if we never sit and do the opposite? Contrast is so essential to the human experience. Pleasure is not pleasurable if we drown ourselves in it. The first beer after a hard day’s work in the sun is always far more enjoyable than the fifth. I understand those further along The Path then me might bring up that to identify contrast is the first step toward attachment, or some bullshit along those lines. That is not what I am saying here. You are not identifying with the sitting process, you just are sitting, the fact that there will be contrast of that lived experience following a time of doing nothing is, as it were, besides the point.
So please, for yourself, sit quietly for a time. Put your phone down, grab a cushion and just sit. Do nothing. It will be nothing if not boring.
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