“it’s more important than ever to relearn the art of rest”
So says "time coach" Elizabeth Grace Saunders: When you come out of a major busy season or complete a massive project, it’s more important than ever to relearn the
How Thomas Hobbes worked
From John Aubrey, A Brief Life of Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679: As I remember, there were others likewise did preach his doctrine. This little MS treatise grew to he
“even our means of relaxation is… overstimulation”
"I teach at a university where many students pride themselves on the “study hard, party hard” lifestyle," writes Duke University professor Omid Safi in an essay on "The Disease
Distraction, idleness and “fruitful production”
From Joseph Jastrow, The subconscious (1906): [D]istraction and the idler moments of contemplative revery are as essential to fruitful production as the intent periods of executive effort; the
“If you are losing your leisure… you are losing your soul”
“If you are losing your leisure, look out, it may be you are losing your soul.” (Logan Pearsall Smith to Virginia Woolf, December 1 1932)
Shakespeare and Co. in Vanity Fair
I've spent some of the happiest hours of my life in bookstores. When I was a child, I would spend afternoons after school in the Vanderbilt bookstore, reading
“A walk of twenty or thirty miles a day is one of his favorite amusements”
One of the things that constantly amazes me about our ancestors is how much more exercise they got in the course of a day, and especially how much
William James on the “fireside tabby-cats of Norway”
From William James' The Gospel of Relaxation, a great bit about the impact of exercise on one's capacity to contribute to public life: Consider, for example, the effects
Is there an art of thought?
Recently I've been reading Graham Wallas's 1926 book The Art of Thought and his other works, and am now in the process of working it into Rest. Wallas is one
Learn how to be bored and brilliant
I was recently interviewed for a WNYC feature on technology, attention, boredom and creativity. The show will air sometime in late January, as part of a bigger "Bored and Brilliant: