I checked in with the nurse on duty and went to sit in the aptly named waiting room for my appointment. I promptly lost track of everything as my brain slipped into a kind of semiconscious liminal state. Apparently, it never occurred to me to check the time. I was involved in a game on my phone, scanning email and Instagram.
When the nurse finally called my name, apologizing for the long wait, I looked up, shocked. She said they were running behind and had had some challenges with my paperwork, then offered to write me a note for keeping me so long. Glancing at my watch, I was startled to notice that an entire hour had passed without realizing it. I remarked as much to the nurse, who frowned a bit, perhaps surprised at my ability to be so disconnected from reality.
Later, as I reflected on the situation, I felt some chagrin. It felt like I had been robbed of an hour—not by the doctor (these things happen), but by my own lack of awareness of time. I spent the entire hour in that waiting room unaware that I was even a thinking, breathing human. I sought distraction and was distracted out of sixty minutes I can never get back. I spent that time flippantly, willfully deluded into thinking that I am lousy with hours to spend carelessly and without intention.
The lack of intention was what upset me most. I didn't even have the good grace to be angry that the wait was so long, which would have at least been mildly self-aware. Instead, I lost myself in a tiny glass brick with nothing to show for an hour of my life, except that I could zone out and lose all sense of myself and my surroundings.
I couldn’t even blame my smartphone. That was the thing I used to distract me, but I chose it. The phone could have stayed in my pocket—or better, in the car. The loss of that hour was my fault. I actively refused to take account of whatever time is allotted to me in my waking, conscious life. I sold it for bright lights and memes and an endless, mind-numbing deluge of emails. The whole situation didn’t sit right with me.
At some point, probably in middle school, I learned a mental trick to make the sometimes endless class periods fly by. I would zone out. I’ve always been a “walking daydream,” but I became a black belt in drifting on a sea of disconnected thoughts, and it served me well—especially in math class. It also became a bad habit. I could tune out with the best of them and regularly did, dare I say, particularly in the seemingly endless sermonizing that occurred each week in church, but I also did it when I ought to have been paying attention.
Whenever I needed to distract myself from an unpleasant duration of time, I disappeared into a kind of limbic reality, fuzzy with unfettered, wandering thoughts. As a result, my imagination grew quite robust, but, as with all things, I never mastered when not to disappear into imaginary worlds or untethered thinking. It was a bad habit, and I rightly got the reputation for being a space cadet. It frustrated teachers and parents and irritated friends when I got bored and zipped off to la-la land.
With the advent of mobile phones, many of which had built-in games, I lost myself further in a hand-held universe of endless gameplay or, later, ‘Net surfing. Smartphones, as I’ve written before, are nothing but brain-sucking computers that get us to actively switch off our minds as we mindlessly scroll, search, or stare into a void. Modern smartphones are excellent at getting us to switch off the prefrontal cortex, where concentration and active thinking occur. We just sit and stare, our brains not only untethered but effectively gone. There isn’t even anything remotely instinctual about it. Our eyes are open, but our consciousness vanishes—a kind of voluntary waking coma or catatonia occurs.
🜂
Ancient philosophers understood that humans have agency, which is a fancy way of saying that we can decide to act or not. I have always been fascinated by the implication that a decision we make can have immense consequences for ourselves and others—especially in circumstances where we might not be focused or paying attention at all.
We might call this passive agency: shutting down our awareness to the point where we are less responsive to stimuli than a jellyfish. By contrast, active agency means taking things in hand—being thoughtful and responsible in our choices. In one case, we employ our brain, our intellect, our reason. In the other, we simply switch off. The more I considered it, the more this active/passive idea seemed applicable to my own ability—one might say skill—for tuning out.
All of this made me wonder about why the idea of just sitting in a waiting room caused me such agony that my first instinct was to seek the depths of my mind-numbing smartphone. Why did I so readily switch off agency and seek the mental focus of a pile of sheep dung?
🜂
I grew up before smartphones and personal computers were in everyone’s home. I’m accustomed to the kind of access to technology that prevents boredom, but it wasn’t always thus. As a kid, my job was to entertain myself or, failing that, help clean or cook or jump into some other chores. So I learned to keep myself to myself and, crucially, learned to keep myself from boredom through activity and imagination, at least when I wasn’t in church or school.
These days, no one is ever bored (though there seems to be an endless supply of boring people—but that's a somewhat different problem) long enough to get into any kind of extremity. I see people out to dinner with their families, gazing into the smartphone abyss rather than interacting with one another. That's time they'll wish they had back when their hours—or those of their loved ones—reach zero balance. This was the part of the waiting room episode that truly irked me: my own willingness to switch off my consciousness in exchange for a glowing screen and, of course, the wasted hour of my life.
All of this made me wonder if I even had the ability to just sit without distraction—or without zooming off into la-la land. Could I sit for just one hour alone with my thoughts, unentangled by my bad attention habits, without the lotus-like attention-eater of my phone?
The idea fascinated me, especially because I was a little nervous that the answer might be “no.” So, I decided to spend one hour of my day in intentional silence. I would just sit. No technology, no distractions. One hour, just sitting. I was ambivalent, of course. This was going to take effort, but I thought it was a worthy exercise—especially for someone like me, who has a dangerous inability to stay in the moment when waiting is required.
I chose a day when I knew that I would have at least an hour to myself, without interruptions. When that day arrived, I prepared myself for the experiment. Micki had gone to work, and the pups were quietly snoozing in their crate. I was the only human at home, and so I went into my Green Behemoth Room and sat on the floor in front of the old green couch and took a few deep breaths.
At first, I noticed that I was keenly aware of how much time lay ahead of me. There I was, just sitting, and I was already champing to be up and doing, or to look at my phone, or to do anything, just so long as it wasn’t sitting there. The sensation was like an agonizing itch. I reached for my phone several times, only to remember it wasn't there. The last time, I sighed and said, “Seriously?”
I tried to settle down. Accepting that I wouldn’t have my phone to ease the hour by, I moved on to trying to guess how much time had passed. The alarm (set in another room) was out of sight, and I had taken my watch off to curb the temptation to check it incessantly. Then, as these first jitters passed, I struck out into this new realm of just sitting with something like an open mind.
I hadn’t made many rules for myself, but I didn’t want to doze, nor did I want to get caught up in too thick a reverie. I decided to take the tack of some mindfulness exercises and, when my thoughts drifted too far, call myself back. At first, it was a challenge. The mind is never really silent, and what Buddhists call “monkey brain” took over. For me, it’s more like a five-year-old version of myself, tirelessly asking questions. Soon enough, though, and with some patience, one can ease the savage child simply by mentally looking at whatever it is the kid is pointing at. I found that a kind of pleasant emptiness filled my head as I acknowledged the seemingly endless mental jumping about.
Eventually, I became conscious that, paying attention to the light of the room, the sounds, the birds outside, the traffic on the street, even the dull hum of the HVAC unit in the attic, that I was just sitting and the world hadn’t ended. It didn’t bother me at all once I’d gotten there. In fact, it was peaceful and pleasant, even pleasurable to just sit and be awake and aware.
I was beginning to really enjoy the quietude, the soothing mental state of sitting in contemplation, when the alarm went off. An hour had passed quickly, and I felt a little sad. I sat for a while longer, slowly coming back to the world. The rest of that day, I was unusually tuned to time passing. I was quieter, more thoughtfully aware of the world and my place in it. I think I even slept more calmly that night, less daunted by the long, sometimes wakeful hours when I lay there wishing for sleep to return.
🜂
I’ve struggled all my life with periods of waiting, paying attention, living with intention in the moment. If there’s nothing going on, I’d rather be up and doing, entertaining myself—or looking for something to entertain me, like TV or my phone. And yet, those moments of distraction are as much a part of my life as the times when I’m gliding along happily. They have the same value, the same worth, and just like every moment of our lives, we cannot get them back once they are spent.
Intentionally sitting and doing nothing seems to have a very efficacious way of making a third road for me between actively seeking to be entertained at every waking moment and drifting off into la-la land. Just sitting for an hour isn't avoidance or distraction. It forces me to use the time and spend it thoughtfully, actively listening to my headspace, growing a sense of connection with myself and with the passage of time as each moment slips by.
Although I wouldn't qualify my experiment as meditation, it did seem to help me find a type of mindfulness that soothed my otherwise sometimes troublingly distracted brain. I have found a tool, and it is fairly inexpensive. It just requires one hour of my day, unplugged, away from TVs and smartphones. The reward is a mind soothed of distraction and interruption—and a smoothed-out emotional state. This is a gift, especially in a world where distraction has become the norm and where, as often as possible, we all seek to disconnect from reality. We could all benefit from giving ourselves the present of sitting through an hour.
