Tag: Peace

Lightly Child, Lightly. (Ataraxia)

Live & Learn15 Comments

Sitting on that height, facing the brightening light, this is what I understood, not as a proposition of words, but as if it had taken full occupancy of my mind in a moment, as an image might occupy it, or a mathematical proof. Afterwards, when I translated what I had experienced, what I wrote had none of the force of what had happened. A long life and a short life are the same, because the present is the only life we have – the same for everyone. It was like a description of music. As the light poured into my eyes, exciting their nerves, causing reactions in the brain, the reactions gave rise to something beyond any contentment – a submission, blissful. The moment of the present becomes instantly the past, I wrote. The present was almost-nothing; I was almost-nothing – a momentary arrangement of energy. And when the time came for the arrangement of energy that went by my name to collapse, and become a different arrangement, barely anything would be changed. A slight readjustment of a few lives, for a while. Some after-life in the memory of a small number of people, for some of whom I was already nothing but a memory. Into the great indifference, I wrote, but the words caused a chill, a shiver, which I had not experienced in those minutes at the ruins. Everything is becoming – nothing rests, I added, on the next line. A less discomfiting formulation. At the ruins, I witnessed transition in everything: the slow movement of the clouds, the slower rising of the sun, the agitation of the sea. I witnessed it and felt it: with each breath, each heartbeat, I was changing, a changing thing among other things that were changing. More: as I gazed at that uncertain horizon, across the glowing water and the glowing leaves, the elements of the scene lost their separation. All categories and names were lost in the totality of it, dissolved in the light. This was how the episode achieved its climax, in an overwhelming acceptance. An Amen of sorts. That was what I wrote. ‘Ataraxia’ is a word I might have used, had it been at my disposal then.

An awareness of discomfort brought me back to myself – I had to stand up. One leg had become numb. True contemplatives are made of tougher stuff, I was soon telling myself, on the descent. As I picked my way down the crumbling path, I was starting to make phrases. A long life and a short life are the same was composed before I reached the car. As was Life – the intermission. And the ten-minute mystic. There has been nothing like it since. Not even ten minutes.

Standard reality reasserted itself promptly.

— Jonathan Buckley, One Boat: A Novel (W.W. Norton & Company, November 4, 2025)

Notes:

  • Book Reviews Cafe: “Review: One Boat by Jonathan Buckley“
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Yes. This… ‘something has changed’

Live & Learn27 Comments

How often have we heard it: Stay busy to make the most of the time we have left. But there’s a lot to be said for doing the opposite…

Several times during the past few months, I have found myself engaged in what has never been one of my strong suits—doing nothing.

The experience of doing nothing crept up on me this summer, surrounded by the stillness and quiet of our family cabin in southwestern Virginia. The hypnotic sound of the Maury River 100 feet away set the stage. Knowing that I wouldn’t be disturbed by friends or family while sitting on the back porch long before the sun came up added to the sensation of being free from interruption before the day began.

Nor was I planning the morning’s activities or concerned about wasting minutes or hours that could be better spent on a project. I wasn’t worried that time was passing; I had instead the unusual sensation that time was standing still.

It reminded me of the poet Carl Sandburg’s famous line: “The fog comes on little cat feet.”
Just like you can’t plan for fog, you can’t plan for doing nothing. But you can go to a place where not much happens and feel it slip silently in. The cabin was and is such a place for me. For others, it might be a religious or spiritual space, a blanket on the sand near the ocean, or a favorite chair next to a window.

As a writer and editor, I thrived for years on the need to meet deadlines and on the adrenaline of being praised or promoted for my work. For many people who were focused on their careers, doing nothing was never an option. The answer to “What are you up to?” was always an activity, an event, a new job. As I remember it, no one said, “Nothing.”

It took several years of being fully retired before I could frame this feeling of doing nothing as a new opportunity, an antidote to the expected busyness of retirement: traveling, writing, volunteering, socializing, taking care of grandchildren—all meaningful and done willingly—along with chores and checklists. I was following one of the most important commandments of retirement: Keep busy to stave off feelings of isolation or depression.

Even as I recognized the limitations of that prime directive, I initially felt a vague uneasiness about my appreciation of the virtue of doing nothing. Does it suggest aimless drift? Lack of imagination to come up with activities that make the most of my retirement years? The opposite of doing nothing—doing something—is always present in our lives. But I have come to realize that one doesn’t exclude the other. Rather, they are complementary.

What resonates most for me about doing nothing is the ability to let go of the external and even internal forces that define most of my days; to meditate without intentionally making it an “activity”; to see and hear things more clearly, not worrying about having to pass judgment on any thought that crosses my mind or wondering what follow-up might be necessary. It’s ceding control in a way that I have habitually worked against. It is not a timeout—more of a “time in” to a different way of seeing myself.

Earlier this summer, I read “This Is Happiness,” by Niall Williams, about a fictional Irish community in the mid-20th century where rain is a constant presence in the lives of the town’s poor residents, until it isn’t. “You don’t see rain stop, but you sense it,” he writes at one point. “You hear the quietness you thought was silence get quieter still, and you raise your head so your eyes can make sense of what your ears have already told you, which at first is only: something has changed.”

The quote describes more eloquently than my words how I felt that morning at the cabin when something for me had changed. It was the realization that in experiencing the peace that doing nothing brings, I could acknowledge quietly to myself, “This is happiness.”

— Robbie Shell, from “The Joy of Doing Nothing in Retirement” (wsj.com, Nov 18, 2025)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn36 Comments

Now that I’m deep in my 80s, I’d like to stay here forever, and I’ll certainly try. I enjoy being here. The decade is the October of aging. And October is a lovely month, don’t you think? […]

Things I can’t do any more: Run. Play basketball or tennis. I also can’t worry myself to death, or I choose not to. Before my October years, there seemed to be nothing, however inconsequential, that I could not stew over until it grew as big and menacing as Godzilla at night. Nothing was too trivial for my troubled mind. No small rejection. Not the slightest slight. I once came up with a rule, “Nobody’s thinking about you — they are thinking about themselves, just like you.” I wrote it but I didn’t believe it. Now I hardly care if anyone is thinking about me, or not. Hardly.

My love of nature has grown much deeper in this decade. I had always felt an affinity with the natural world, but it was general, casual and fleeting. These days you can catch me at the window, gazing in wonder at the East River (estuary technically), and mesmerized by the shapes in the blue-gray water, the welts and eddies, the tides, the invading armies of the waves, the clouds reflected, looking like submerged sheep.

It’s not what you do in this decade that’s so unusual, or what you think, but rather how you think. The air changes in October. I find myself thinking far less selfishly, giving much more of myself to my friends and family. […]

The general improvement is this: In my younger years I was always looking ahead for whatever would befall me. Now I look at what I have. And as those in their 80s appreciate, what one has is considerable. I don’t fear winter, and I don’t regret spring. […]

— Roger Rosenblatt, excerpts “I Don’t Fear Winter, and I Don’t Regret Spring” (NY Times, October 26, 2025)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn13 Comments

At the Marlboro Music School and Festival this summer, my fellow musicians and I spent an evening listening to historical recordings, an annual tradition. We ended with the slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet (Op. 127), performed by the Busch Quartet, refugees from Hitler’s Germany.

This music is as profound as can be. From the first notes, I was in tears. Time was suspended, and nothing else existed. When it ended, I quietly left the room. Making polite conversation would have brought me back to earth; I wasn’t ready.

What I had experienced was complete immersion into music.

Most of life’s great moments are like this. We give our full attention to one thing, and marvel at its beauty and strangeness and specificity. Past disappointments and future worries evanesce, allowing us to take in the present in its totality.

But in today’s frenetic world, such moments are increasingly hard to come by. We should consider how rare and treasurable this kind of immersion is. […]

All sorts of people more qualified than I — sociologists, political scientists and media critics — have addressed the pernicious effects of social media and algorithmic marketing on our society and psyches. But I can testify that music is uniquely well positioned to provide an antidote to this avalanche of stimulus.

You may prefer literature or painting as art forms, but they do not have music’s magnificent, peculiar abstraction. Novels use words; even an abstract expressionist painter relies on colors and shapes that exist in nature and our lives. But instrumental music is not “about” anything. It stirs the emotions despite — or maybe because of — its inability to reference our lived experience in any literal way. A great performance of a great piece of music simultaneously takes us out of our heads and puts us in touch with our deepest, most inaccessible selves. That is the magic of music. […]

As I listened to this astonishing music in the Marlboro dining hall, I never opened my eyes. This was an instinct. I sensed an opportunity to be connected to something profound and beautiful and in no way ordinary, and I did not want to let my other senses intrude on the experience. In our splintered, combustible world, this immersion is the path of most resistance, and a gift beyond words.

— Jonathan Bliss, from “Too Many Dings and Beeps? Try Beethoven” (NY Times, Sept 28, 2025)

Mr. Biss is a concert pianist and co-artistic director of the Marlboro Music School and Festival

Portrait: OC87 Recovery Diaries. Photographer: Benjamin Ealovega

5:00 PM Bell!

Live & Learn20 Comments

From here she could see a whole teeming mass…running about the city like ants, all dedicated to the same pointless task. She stepped back. It felt good to escape above, free of the noise… “It’s lovely here,” she said.”

Go now. Find your peace… Let your mind wander. Skim like a dragonfly over the pool of your consciousness and let go… you can quiet your mind.

— R.F. Kuang, Katabasis: A Novel (William Morrow, August 26, 2025)

Notes: