Man and Church
The Discipline of Doing Nothing
In a world that measures success by productivity, the ancient Orthodox practice of stillness teaches us that time spent in silence and prayer is never wasted.
I recently came across a trend on social media in which people are challenging themselves to sit still with no screens or sources of entertainment for an hour. They film themselves, alone in a room or in the forest with nothing but their mind to entertain them, and post the footage (sped up of course) to show the world, “look at what I was able to do, isn’t that crazy?”
It is crazy, considering that the majority of us would struggle mightily to contend with deafening silence for that long. The truth is, if we had nothing to entertain or stimulate us for an entire hour, our minds would short circuit and steam would shoot out of our ears.
What does this say about the state of our minds and souls? Can we reverse the mental rot we’ve become accustomed to as a result of constant entertainment and stimulation and become a little more like the desert fathers, who spent hours each day in prayer?
