The Wisdom of Sitting
Sit: to be or remain in a particular position or state. To let yourself cool. To let yourself calm. To let your busy mind consider what it already knows without pushing it to learn more and more.
I reference Maisie Dobbs a lot, even though she’s a fictional character (I’ll not apologize for it. She’s a really inspiring fictional character). One of the traits I admire most about Maisie she learned from Dr. Maurice Blanche and Khan: to sit. When she’s struggling with connecting the dots on one of her case maps or when she finds herself biased and pulled to a conclusion too early in the investigation, she carefully closes her books and brief case, removes her shoes, and sits silently on the ground, letting the information marinate. It’s a fictional character trait, true, but it has its foundation in reality.
Sitting gives the mind a break — a gap — in time where it can process information, stabilize, and then get creative with what it already knows.
If you think about a time when you wanted to hold something in memory — a number, maybe, or a reminder to yourself — you’ll know that distractions such as loud noises or someone talking to you were unwelcome. “Shhh…one second, I’m concentrating.”
What’s happening here? You are seeking a break in input so that you can process what you’ve already learned. Like a muscle after exercise, the real increase comes after the stimulus has ended.
So what happens if you just continually fill your mind with new information without pausing afterward? Scrolling through feeds; reading short, punchy articles; watching endless TikTok videos; constantly asking google or Siri or Alexa to answer your every curiosity without putting in work at a much slower cadence? You get the input then and there, over and over, but you don’t leave room to just sit with the information, and so you never fully process it.
Without negative space, art is just colored paper.
Without silence, music is just noise.
Many (perhaps every) ancient culture and religion has offered — often without even knowing the science behind it — the wisdom of sitting: prayer, meditation, sitting shiva, silent retreat. These are all practices that bring a sort of slowness, a softness, a recovery and rejuvenation. That wisdom continues today, but we are often too distracted to hear it. It becomes one of a hundred memes we see each day, one of a hundred snippets on a screen that we swipe quickly in order to see the next one, one of a hundred voices each saying very little but cumulatively filling our minds with noise.
What might happen if you changed the entire cadence of what you take in? If you moved more slowly through your day. If you were more selective. If you chose your inputs with care and gave them attention in a slow and methodical way? What if you just…sit…for awhile?
If you move too quickly and never stop, you may find that life has passed you by.
— — — —
If you liked or learned from this story, please clap👏 👏 👏, highlight, share with anyone who’d enjoy it, and follow my page. Thanks for reading!
