Being still

 From Pico Iyer I learned that there is something called interruption science and that its researchers have found that it takes 25 minutes to recover from a telephone call, while phone calls and other such interruptions occur, on average, every 11 minutes.

I get few calls these days. But I made up for it with a lifetime in newsrooms, where the telephone ringing every 11 minutes would have been a slow day.

But that’s not the point of Iyer’s story. The point is that we busy ourselves into a state where we never recover our sense of stillness, calm, sanity.

• Source: Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness; New York: TED Books, 2014, p. 41.