This may seem a bit trivial, especially with everything I have to do. This is after all the planning season for next year’s farm. I need to till new beds, build new chicken tractors, set up my greenhouse trays, and order seed. On top of that I have my writing, other work, and the myriad activities I find myself involved in. But that quiet time to myself everyday is becoming more and more essential.

That all our miseries come from not being able to sit quietly in a room means essentially that all of our miseries come from not being reflective or contemplative enough. We are dominated by activity without time for sitting and listening, and without that listening we simply act out of a shallow self. If there is any one source of the environmental destruction that has plagued our world I think we could call it “dissatisfaction”—and dissatisfied people find it almost torturous to sit quietly. It is dissatisfaction that drives our need to buy, our need to constantly consume. It is dissatisfaction that makes us want a bigger house, a bigger TV, a newer car. And all of these things are what drives our environmental destruction.  If we consumed less, worked less, drove less—wouldn’t the world be better off?

And yet we can’t be quiet long enough to consider the alternative. How many people sleep with the TV or radio on?  How many cannot sit even ten minutes quietly without feeling as though they are going stir crazy. When I first started my daily quiet time, I set a timer and less than half way through the half hour I found myself surprised that so little time had passed. I wanted to get up and do something, but I forced myself to sit and listen for whatever came. And this listening was training for the many other kinds of listening that I need—listening to others, to the land, to that which makes life meaningful.

And that listening, all of our listening, is the first step to saving this world, because it is in the quiet that we will begin to hear the dissatisfactions that drive our consumption and destruction. We distract ourselves from the things that will truly satisfy us, because it is often easier to just go from one temporary satisfaction to another than to find lasting satisfaction. But it is essential that we find a satisfaction that lasts, or else we keep destroying the world with a hunger that won’t be satisfied, always loosening out belts.  In sitting still and quiet, in listening, I discover that my life is too frantic, that perhaps all of the CDs and books and tools that pepper my Christmas list really aren’t what I’m after.  What I really want is to have time to do nothing, to take a walk with a friend in the middle of the day, to stay up late in a long conversation.  And in listening I begin to see the real roots of my environmental laziness: The can I tossed in the trash carelessly and the wasteful way I use what I have comes from my rushing around. By being still and quiet I learn to keep a slower, steady pace.  

So sit quietly a while. See what you hear and then act on that rather than an advertiser’s promises of happiness. Consuming less and doing less will make you happier and give you a new ear for what is truly valuable.