story by

Drs. Blair & Rita Justice

The CITS motor coach slowly bumped and lurched its way for two hours up, down, and around a road better suited for yaks. The driver winced with every blow to his bus. We were a small group of pilgrims, 12 in all, making our way over the 13,000–foot pass strewn with tattered and new prayer flags, to Samye Monastery, built in 779, the oldest in Tibet. Located on the southern bank of the Yarlung Zangbo River, the Samye Monastery is home to the Red Sect (Yellow Hat) monks.

We finally arrived and walked into the monastery just as 20 Yellow Hat monks seated themselves at the entrance in two parallel rows and began chanting. It wasn’t planned. No one expected to see them, much less hear them, not even the local guide. But it was one of those moments when it is clear that one is in the right place at the right time.

The journey back across the river was on the traditional wooden “pilgrim’s boat,” not much more than a raft in truth. The snow-capped Himalayan Range reflected in the still water as the boatman navigated a labyrinthine path around the sandbars. The group fell into a spontaneous silence as we meandered our aquatic way to the bus waiting somewhere on the other side.

We weren’t the only visitors slipping into the "timeless realm." Even the red carpet in the Lhasa Hotel elevator, printed in English and Chinese with the day of the week, was rotated each day to give tourists a hint at time orientation.

Settling into this ancient silence can be a challenge for modern multi-taskers, East or West. We get used to the stimulation and the impulse gratification from being able to hit a button and make something happen—music, messages, news, movies.

On this journey, there were many occasions when being present in the moment was just about the only option. Most of us didn’t have stomachs steady enough to read on the rugged winding roads of Tibet. Cell phones worked only if you had China Wireless as your provider. Other than conversing while wearing an iPod, there just weren’t that many multi-tasking opportunities. But getting used to silence is possible, sometimes profitable, and even the unimaginable: enjoyable.

Time on your hands

Robert A. Johnson, a Jungian analyst now in his 90s, learned long ago how his world was transformed by silence. In Balancing Heaven and Health: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations, he tells how this came about. “The year was 1944, one of the darkest in my life.” Johnson was 22 and classified 4F (unfit for service) by the government because of an artificial leg. Left behind when all able-bodied young men were fighting in the war, he got a summer job with the U.S. Forest Service as a lookout in a fire watchtower.

Johnson was assigned to the top of Burley Mountain, 6,410 ft. in elevation, halfway between Mount Rainier and Mount Saint Helen. His job was to search for fires 15 minutes out of each hour and call in a weather report at noon each day. “For the first few days time weighed very heavy on my hands. I found myself constantly looking at my watch, only to find that the hour hand was moving at a glacier’s pace.

“By the third day, however, something changed. I took on an animal relationship to time. Time was no longer an entity that pressured me. In a psychological sense, time stopped—a rare experience for modern people. It became like the flow of a river, and gradually I came into accord with the rest of nature. I was never again bored or lonely that summer.”

He reflects, “...it took only three days after I went down to the city to snap back into civilized time again and become anxious, worried, lonely and restless. Living in the wilderness frees us from the tyranny of time and reveals how different existence was for our ancestors.”

Multi-tasking mania

While the wilderness and faraway lands may give us a boost over the prison walls of “the tyranny of time,” there are opportunities to enter sacred silence if only we weren’t so afraid of what we might miss. In an interview by Matt Richtel in The New York Times (April 22, 2007), Dr. James E. Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Computing, argued that compulsively using all communication devices “gives people a sense of belonging, one traceable to atavistic desire to congregate and cooperate for safety and survival.”

“In addition,” he said, “the constant checking is an exercise in optimism, like being an explorer or a gambler. Eternal hope delivered in tiny bits while you’re on the go. It’s random reinforcement. The fact that you don’t know when important news will come means you will quickly engage in obsessive-compulsive behavior.”

Dr. John Ratey, a clinical associate professor of neuropsychiatry at Harvard University, also interviewed by Matt Richtel, uses the term acquired attention deficit disorder “to describe the condition of people who are accustomed to a constant stream of digital stimulation and feel bored in the absence of it. Regardless of whether the stimulation is from the Internet, TV, or a cell phone, the brain is hijacked.”

Brain can’t do two things at once

The evidence is mounting fast, though, that we are already missing out on a lot more than we think by trying to do so much at once. Multitasking, it turns out, slows us down, increasing the chances of mistakes. “A core limitation of the brain is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,”explains Dr. Rene Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.

In research reported in the journal Neuron, Marois and colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure how much efficiency is lost when the brain is trying to handle two tasks at once. They found that there was no delay in responding correctly if the participants were given the tasks one at a time. But the response was delayed when two tasks were given at about the same time. It was only a one-second delay, but, as Marois pointed out, a one-second delay in response time at 60 miles an hour could prove fatal.

You are here. Now.

The problem, though, isn’t only that the brain is not designed to do what we’re trying to make it do. We resist, and perhaps even forget, how to be present to what is happening right now. In The Art of Possibility, the authors, Rosamund and Benjamin Zander write: “Being present to the way things are is not the same as accepting things as they are in the resigned way of the cow. It doesn’t mean you should drown out your negative feelings or pretend you like what you really can’t stand. It doesn’t mean you should work to achieve some ‘higher plane of existence‘ so you can ‘transcend negativity.’ It simply means, being present without resistance: being present to what is happening and present to your reactions, no matter how intense...Indeed, the capacity to be present to everything that is happening, without resistance, creates possibility...You can leave behind the struggle to come to terms with what is in front of you, and move on.”

Boredom, at its essence, is an unwillingness to be where we are. It may seem to be an impossible or even pointless challenge—emotionally and sometimes physically—to be present to “the way things are.” But to the extent we manage to do so, we are ensuring that we succeed in not missing out on any part of our lives, bumpy roads, blissful silence, all-out celebrations. We get to be there for every moment we live.

Last Updated: 7-11-2007

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