Stillness: Ideas for rest and attention. - Page 26

Editor’s note

Stillness

Selected for perspectives on rest, attention, patience and decision-making.

Q2037

StillnessHistory

Before artificial light, much of Europe slept in two shifts: a 'first sleep' from nightfall, an hour or so of quiet wakefulness, then a 'second sleep' until dawn. The pattern appears in court records, prayer books and letters across languages.

Historian Roger Ekirch pieced the habit together from thousands of references — people used the waking interval to pray, talk, mend, or simply lie thinking in the dark. The rhythm faded in the nineteenth century as gaslight and industrial timetables compressed the night. Evidence suggests it ruled pre-industrial Europe rather than all humanity, so it is best read not as a prescription, but as a reminder: the eight-hour block is a recent invention, and a 3am waking was once nothing to fear.

Segmented sleepRead card

Q2038

StillnessLanguage

The English word 'noon' comes from the Latin 'nona hora' — the ninth hour of daylight, around 3pm — one of the fixed hours when monastic communities paused to pray. Over the medieval centuries, the word slid back to midday.

Before mechanical clocks, the day was sliced by bells: the canonical hours of prayer gave whole communities their shared timetable. Why 'nones' crept from mid-afternoon to midday is uncertain — historians point to shifting meal and fasting times, and to daylight hours that stretched and shrank with the seasons. Dutch made the same journey with its 'noen'. Inside one small word sits a lost world where time was something you heard, not something you checked.

Word historyRead card

Q2039

StillnessLanguage

Japanese tea culture keeps a four-character phrase, 'ichi-go ichi-e' — one lifetime, one meeting. However often the same guests gather in the same room, this exact hour will never assemble itself again, and should be honoured accordingly.

The sentiment goes back to the great tea master Sen no Rikyū's circle — a disciple recorded in 1588 that every gathering should be treated as one that can occur only once in a lifetime. The exact phrase was set down in 1858 by the statesman and tea devotee Ii Naosuke. It is not a call to melancholy but to attention: pour the tea as if this is the only time, because it is.

Ichi-go ichi-eRead card

Q2040

StillnessArt

In 2011, Norway's public broadcaster televised a coastal voyage in full: 134 hours, live, unedited. Roughly half the population tuned in at some point. 'Slow TV' had begun two years earlier with a seven-hour train ride that became a surprise hit.

The Bergen-to-Oslo train broadcast of 2009 drew over a million Norwegian viewers, many of whom reportedly reached for their coats at the final station announcement. The Hurtigruten voyage of June 2011 still holds the record for the longest live documentary ever aired. No plot, no commentary, no cuts — just coastline, weather and the occasional waving crowd on a pier. Its makers' theory: television had forgotten that attention can be restful rather than captured.

Slow televisionRead card

Q2041

StillnessMind

In a small 2020 study, adults in their 60s to 90s took one 15-minute walk a week. Those asked to notice vastness — skies, trees, small wonders — reported growing compassion and gratitude, and even smiled more broadly in their own photographs.

The researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, tracked selfies the walkers took en route: over eight weeks, the awe group gave more of the frame to the scenery and less to themselves — a shrinking of the 'small self' that awe researchers consider the emotion's signature. The comparison group simply walked. Fifty-two people is a modest sample, so read it gently; but the cost of the experiment is one attentive walk, and the walk is pleasant either way.

Awe walk studyRead card

Q2042

StillnessMind

A smartphone study that pinged 1,292 people through their ordinary days found that moments with birds — seen or simply heard — were linked to a lift in mental wellbeing that lasted for hours, including among people living with depression.

The King's College London team collected nearly 27,000 real-time check-ins between 2018 and 2021, catching people in the moment rather than in memory. It is an association, not proof of cause — happier people may also linger where birds are. But the effect outlasted the encounter by hours, and the prescription it hints at costs nothing: a window open at dawn, a slower route through the park, a pause at the sound of song.

Urban Mind studyRead card

Q2043

StillnessMind

In a set of Stanford experiments, people generated ideas while sitting, then while walking. Walking raised creative output by roughly 60 per cent on average — and it worked even on a treadmill facing a blank wall.

The four experiments covered 176 people and tested divergent thinking — the ability to pour out varied, novel uses and analogies. The blank-wall treadmill result matters: it suggests the legs, not the scenery, do much of the lifting. One caution from the same paper: on focused, single-answer puzzles, walkers did slightly worse. So the old writers' habit sorts itself neatly — walk to find the idea, sit to finish it.

Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014Read card

Q2044

StillnessHistory

The medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela had nearly died out: in 1985, the cathedral recorded about 690 arrivals on foot or bicycle. Four decades later, more than half a million pilgrims complete the Camino in a single year.

The numbers count 'compostelas' — certificates issued to those who complete the final stretch — so the true crowd is larger still. The revival began quietly: a village priest waymarking routes with yellow arrows in the 1980s, then European cultural recognition in 1987. Most modern walkers are not conventionally religious; they come for the oldest reasons anyway — to think, to grieve, to decide something, or simply to move at the speed a human life actually runs.

Camino de SantiagoRead card

Q2045

StillnessMind

Cardiologists once played listeners six styles of music while tracking heart rate, breathing and blood pressure. Fast tempos stirred the body, slow ones settled it — but a randomly inserted two-minute silence relaxed people more than any music at all.

The silence did not merely return listeners to their starting state — measurements dipped below the pre-music baseline, as if the pause borrowed calm from the contrast. The study was small, two dozen people, half of them trained musicians; the journal's own editorial was titled 'The sound of silence is music to the heart'. Composers knew it first: the rest is not the absence of music but part of its grammar.

Bernardi study, 2006Read card

Q2046

StillnessScience

The Cloud Appreciation Society, founded in 2005 to defend 'unfairly maligned' clouds, collected members' photographs of a strange, turbulent formation. In 2017 the World Meteorological Organization added it to the International Cloud Atlas as 'asperitas'.

The trail began with a 2006 photograph from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, of a sky like a rough sea viewed from below. Founder Gavin Pretor-Pinney — whose society's manifesto pledges to 'fight blue-sky thinking' — spent years proposing the classification, and 'asperitas', from the Latin for roughness, became the first new name added to the atlas since 1951. Amateurs with cameras and patience still get to write in science's reference books.

AsperitasRead card

Q2047

StillnessCulture

Japanese has a word for falling asleep in public — 'inemuri', often glossed as 'sleeping while present'. A nap in a meeting or on a train is widely tolerated, and can even be read as proof of working to the point of exhaustion.

The sociologist Brigitte Steger, who has studied Japanese sleep habits for decades, notes that inemuri obeys unwritten rules — who may doze, where, and how visibly depends on status and situation, and the sleeper is expected to snap back the moment they are needed. It is tolerance rather than official policy. The idea unsettles cultures that treat visible rest as weakness; inemuri quietly asks why exhaustion should have to hide.

InemuriRead card

Q2048

StillnessMind

In a forest kindergarten there are no classrooms at all: children aged three to six spend the day among trees in nearly all weather, learning with mud, sticks, rope and their own judgement. The idea is credited to a Danish mother in the early 1950s.

Ella Flatau's habit of minding neighbourhood children in the woods grew into a movement: Germany officially recognised 'Waldkindergärten' in 1993, unlocking state funding, and by recent counts runs well over 1,500 of them. The Scandinavian shorthand is that there is no bad weather, only bad clothes. Advocates point to balance, risk judgement and calm; the quieter lesson is about trust — small children, handed a real forest, mostly rise to it.

Forest kindergartenRead card

Q2049

StillnessMind

On Japanese railways, drivers and platform staff point at signals, gauges and doors while calling their status aloud — a ritual called shisa kanko. In a railway institute experiment, the habit cut errors on a routine task to about one-sixth.

The gesture looks theatrical to visitors — a white-gloved conductor pointing down an empty platform, announcing 'all clear' to nobody. But the mechanism is sound: pointing forces the eyes to the object, speaking forces the mind to commit, and together they interrupt the autopilot that lets a familiar task slip past unchecked. The figure comes from a laboratory task rather than accident records, so hold it loosely; New York's subway adopted a pointing-only version anyway.

Shisa kankoRead card

Q2050

WonderMind

The claim that human attention has shrunk to eight seconds — 'less than a goldfish' — traces to a 2015 marketing report whose cited sources could not be found. Goldfish, meanwhile, remember trained routes and feeding times for months.

When the BBC's statisticians hunted the famous numbers, the trail died at a statistics website that could not say where they came from; the psychologists cited had never measured any such thing. Attention has no single span to shrink — it stretches and collapses with the task, which is why the same person doomscrolls at noon and reads a novel till midnight. The goldfish deserves an apology: laboratories use it precisely because it learns and remembers so well.

Attention span mythRead card

Q2061

WonderScience

In January 2025, a European team drilling at Little Dome C in Antarctica reached bedrock 2,800 metres down, recovering a continuous ice record spanning at least 1.2 million years — snow that fell long before our species existed.

Each layer holds bubbles of the actual air of its era, so the core is a direct archive of ancient atmospheres — and may explain why the planet's ice-age rhythm mysteriously slowed around a million years ago. The cores travelled to Europe at minus fifty degrees aboard an icebreaker, and laboratories across ten countries began reading them; the deepest, disturbed metres may prove older still. Somewhere in a freezer sits weather from before humanity.

Beyond EPICARead card

Q2065

WonderTechnology

Deep in a west Texas mountain, engineers are installing a clock designed to keep time for ten thousand years — powered partly by daily temperature swings, ticking through centuries whether or not anyone visits.

Designer Danny Hillis proposed it in the 1990s as a provocation: civilisation, he argued, had lost the habit of thinking past the next quarter. A first prototype has ticked since New Year's Eve 1999 and lives in London's Science Museum; the full-scale version, funded by Jeff Bezos inside a 150-metre shaft, has no announced opening date. The clock is engineered so its bells ring a new sequence each day it chimes — never repeating across ten thousand years.

Clock of the Long NowRead card

Q2066

WonderHistory

At Ise in Japan, the grand shrine's main sanctuaries are dismantled and rebuilt on an adjacent plot every twenty years, a cycle running — with some historical interruptions — since the year 690. The next rebuilding is due in 2033.

The point is not the buildings but the knowledge: each generation of shrine carpenters raises the sanctuaries once as apprentices and once as masters, so thousand-year-old joinery lives in working hands rather than in archives. Western conservation asks how to stop time; Ise answers by letting the wood go and keeping the skill. The shrine is always new and always ancient — a building maintained the way a song is, by being performed again.

Ise Shikinen SenguRead card

Q2067

WonderHistory

The story goes that when New College, Oxford, needed new oak beams for its medieval hall, it found oaks planted centuries earlier for exactly that purpose. The archives tell it differently — and the truth is quietly better.

The hall roof really was rebuilt in oak in 1865, and the college really did own oak woods acquired in the 1400s. But no record supports the beloved details — the purpose-planted grove, the forester's 'we wondered when you'd ask'. What the archives show instead is ordinary, patient woodland management sustained over five centuries, which meant great timber existed whenever it was needed. The legend praises a plan; the reality praises a habit. Habits, it turns out, are the stronger foresight.

New College oaksRead card

Q2071

WonderScience

On Christmas Eve 1968, as Apollo 8 rounded the Moon, astronaut Bill Anders grabbed a camera and caught the Earth rising over the lunar horizon — a small blue world in black space. 'Earthrise' became one of the most influential photographs ever taken.

The crew had been drilled to photograph the Moon, and the moment was unscripted: colour film was found in a hurry while the view slid past the windows. Anders later distilled the mission into one line — they had come all that way to explore the Moon, and what they really discovered was the Earth. The photograph is widely credited with energising the environmental movement; the first Earth Day followed sixteen months later.

Earthrise, 1968Read card

Q2074

StillnessLiterature

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Morrison ended her Nobel lecture with these four sentences. The speech is built on a parable: children hold a bird behind their backs and ask a blind old woman whether it is alive or dead, and she answers that she cannot know — what she knows is that it is in their hands. The bird is language. It can be killed by carelessness or by cruelty, and it is the one thing we make that outlives the mouth that made it.

Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture (1993)Read card

Q2075

DriveLiterature

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

The sentence now travels alone, printed on posters and quoted at conferences. Baldwin wrote it in a 1962 essay for a newspaper book review, and he was talking about novelists — arguing that American writers of his generation flinched from looking at the country they lived in. He built the line as a hinge, turning 'everything' into 'nothing' and swapping the verbs. The promise inside it is deliberately small: facing something guarantees nothing, but nothing happens without it.

James Baldwin, 'As Much Truth As One Can Bear' (1962)Read card

Q2078

StillnessLiterature

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

Hurston wrote the novel in about seven weeks in Haiti, where she had gone to study folk religion and to recover from an affair she could not stay in. The book was dismissed by several of her contemporaries, went out of print, and she died in 1960 in a Florida welfare home, buried in an unmarked grave. In 1973 the novelist Alice Walker went looking for that grave, marked it, and the book came back.

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)Read card

Q2079

StillnessLiterature

The only true voyage of discovery would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.

The version that circulates online — 'not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes' — is a tidied-up shorthand. Proust's actual sentence keeps going, and the extension is the point: to see through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, and so to behold the hundred universes that each of them is. He wrote it in a cork-lined bedroom in Paris, having spent his last years indoors, travelling almost nowhere.

Marcel Proust, The Captive (1923)Read card

Q2080

StillnessLiterature

Seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

These are the last lines of a book in which Marco Polo describes fifty-five imaginary cities to an ageing Kublai Khan. The hell they are discussing is not somewhere else and not later — it is the one we make by living together, Polo says, and there are only two ways out. The first is to stop noticing it. The second is this one, which asks for constant attention and gives no comfort in return.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)Read card

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