We know that we must, to lay claim to any respectability or competence, keep up with
the news. That’s why we’ve ringed the earth with satellites, crisscrossed it with
fiber optic cables, and created networks of bureaus that inform us with maniacal urgency
of pretty much any event to have unfolded anywhere on the planet in the last few moments.
We are, furthermore, equipped with tiny devices that we keep very close to hand, and which
we tend to check at intervals of between one and five minutes (rarely longer) so as to
monitor all unfolding stories in close to real time. We have been granted a ringside
seat on the second by second flow of history. As a result we see a lot more. And at the
same time, strangely, we see a lot less. The constant presence of news from without hampers
our ability to pick up on an equally important, though far less prestigious source of news
from within. We are not, by nature, well equipped to see inside ourselves. Consciousness bobs
like a small boat on a sea of disavowed emotions. A lot of feelings and ideas require a high
degree of courage to confront. They threaten to make us uncomfortably anxious, excited
or sad were we to learn more about them. So we use the news without to silence the news
from within. We have the most prestigious excuse ever invented never to spend any time
roaming freely inside our own minds. It is not that the news from without is unimportant
to someone (indeed, it will be the most important thing in certain people’s lives a continent
away or in a company in the capital or somewhere in the upper reaches of government), it’s
just that this news is almost certainly wholly disconnected from our real priority over the
coming years; which is to make the most of our life and our talents in the time that
remains to us. It is touching that we should give so much of our curiosity over to strangers,
but it is poignant that we are forced eventually to pay such a high price for this constant
dispersal of energy. We dismiss fragile, tentative thoughts about what we should do next, who
we should call, what we really need to do, thoughts upon which an adequate future for
us depends – for the sake of the more obvious drama of the moment. But the drama won’t
save us, and cares not a jot about our development or our real responsibilities. It feels counter-intuitive
to think that there might be certain things more important than the news. But there is:
our own lives – which we have, troublingly, been granted such prestigious reasons and means
to avoid confronting.
We can educate ourselves in the art of being calm.
Not through special teas or slow breathing but through thinking. This book guides us through that process.