Accessing stillness involves reducing expectations, extracting the unnecessary, and focusing intently on the task at hand.

“So I'm interested in how do you have stillness in the real world where you have bills to pay and, you know, a family and a house and neighbors and, You drive a car in traffic. Do you know what I mean? So how do you access stillness in the course of normal, real life? I think solitude and silence are a big part of it, but I'm thinking just the stillness of reducing expectations, reducing or extracting the unnecessary, locking into what you're doing, whatever it is, even if it's a minor thing.”

“So I'm interested in stillness for actual people in the real world. Stillness for Marcus Aurelius as the emperor. So actually, I want to talk about meditation because you specifically don't talk about it. And I think that was a deliberate decision, right? Yeah, it was. What was the basis of that decision? Well, again, we were talking about how do you find people where they are? I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming that people don't meditate don't really want to meditate. The evidence is equally overwhelming that it works, right, and that it's great, but we have trouble getting there. And so when I'm talking about stillness, I didn't want to talk about, first off, I think it's problematic that people live chaotic, dysfunctional, disorganized lives, and then they think going on a seven-day silent meditation retreat is magically going to solve all of that when they're just coming back to their same life right afterwards. So it's like going on a juice cleanse or something. Do you know what I mean? It's not really doing anything. And so the idea was there's lots of great stuff about meditation out there. It's not really what I do anyway, so I'm not going to pretend I'm the expert on it, but... What I can talk about is a more comprehensive sort of philosophical approach to stillness. And let's see if we can't start there. And then at the end of it, I think you're in a better place to try some of those things. Let's start with journaling. Yeah. Stoics journaled. Yeah, we wouldn't have any Stoics. We wouldn't have Marcus Aurelius if the Stoics didn't journal. And what I think is so interesting about Marcus Aurelius is having now started to really study some of the more obscure earlier Stoics is you realize even a lot of the stuff, like a good chunk of meditations is like quotes, like from other people, but even a chunk of the stuff that's not quotes, he didn't make up. Like that he's almost running through like flashcards in this journal. He's like running through exercises or thoughts or things that he's, he's paraphrasing things that he was taught by his teachers. And you realize that philosophy is actually an active word-based writing process, not a book that you read one time and then you've magically absorbed the insights. Let's talk about this process because I think the way you describe meditation, you know, the way I sort of explain it to patients is sort of similar, right? Which is it's not about meditation. Meditation is, it's a tool. It's a training platform, if you will, that teaches you a skill that for me, and I think people more sophisticated than me will be able to talk about much more nuance around this. Like to listen to Sam Harris talk about this, of course, it's infinitely more enlightening. For me, it's simply gap awareness. That's literally all I care about is the gap awareness between stimulus and response. I want a bigger gap. And I do this goofy thing every day, most days, this practice where I sit there and I, you know, focus on my breath and I catch myself thinking and I come back and forth and back and forth and back and forth because as Jeff Warren, who's a great meditation teacher describes it, that's just a bicep curl. I might go into the gym and I'm doing curls or squats or whatever exercise I want to do so that when I leave the gym and I go and pick up my bag of groceries or I go pick up my kid, I have some muscle to do that. And with physical muscles, it's so easy. We're so wired to see that. I think with some of these cognitive emotional muscles, we don't have quite the same. So how do you think about the exercise of bringing stillness in? I mean, you've talked a lot about it. I think we should talk about these in detail. What are the enemies of stillness, right? You know, jealousy and things like that. Maybe we start there actually. And then we'll sort of, unless you think it's better to talk about it in the, yeah, whichever. Let's start with what are the things, what are the obstacles to stillness? I mean, overactivity, certainly sort of committing to more than you can conceivably handle. We talked about sort of enough, like an insatiable demand or need, certainly one of them. I think noise is the enemy of stillness, like unnecessary noise. And that can be internal noise or exterior noise. Bad habits, bad routines, certainly. I think people can get to, you know, they can go on a wonderful vacation and every day they go to this coffee shop and they sit around and they hang out. It's wonderful. And then they go back to their sort of life where they wake up five minutes before they're supposed to go to work and then they're sprinting around. You know what I mean? Or they have a couple days without their phone and then they get addicted to some new app. So it's sort of routine structure limits. The lack thereof is, to me, a huge... obstacle to stillness. I think a deficiency in terms of hobbies or practices in their life. So I think meditation is not just the practice of doing it, it's the having”