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Intentional Cognitive Friction

The sweetness and delights of the resting-place are in proportion to the pain endured on the Journey. Only when you suffer the pangs and tribulations of exile will you truly enjoy your homecoming. (The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi – Book 3)

John Johnston started to talk about ‘clunky-ness’ in technology as a way into digital mindfulness. Recently, on our radio show, we discussed the idea of friction in technology as potentially a way to develop digital skills that may be being lost in the ‘Generator Generation’ as they rely more and more on technology ‘creating’ for them.

I have also been following D’Arcy Norman’s quest to find space away from social media. He seems to also have discovered the value of ‘clunky-ness’ and the tyranny of convenience. He also speaks of adding friction as valuable,

“I’ve deleted the Twitter apps from my devices, and now if I want to check in I have to use the browser. Not having notifications or easy launching of a stream adds a bit of friction. I also have 2-factor authentication enabled, and logout after checking in, so dropping into twitter is deliberately kind of a pain in the ass.”

How is he finding this ‘pain in the ass’ valuable? “I find I’m thinking with less snark. I’m being less sarcastic in general. And I think that has something to do with withdrawing from the hot-take snark-and-sarcasm streams on social media.” Friction accessing social media, just making it more clunky, is allowing him to be more intentional and clearing his head of unnecessary stimuli. Interestingly, we also featured the ‘Space’ app on the Daily Stillness recently. What does it do? It makes accessing apps you use without intention a pain in the ass! From the blurb: “It loads a Moment of Zen before the apps you want space from. That re-wires your brain and helps you take back control of your habit. Because you don’t really want to dump your favourite apps: you just need Space.”

So, Cody De Haan adds further to the above, building in inefficiency is exactly the point:

Now when I pick up my phone, I see essentially a blank slate. This means that instead of seeing a bunch of triggers for distractions, I wind up pausing for a moment to think about what I’m doing. Often I lock my phone again and set it back down, realising that I was just in an avoidant state or trying to distract myself from what I really want to be doing. […] I think the slight delay in typing the app name I’m looking for is balanced out by the time I save not mindlessly scrolling through my apps.

So, I got curious. It seems we are (re)discovering something that has been part of many a spiritual tradition for a long time. The Rumi poem at the start of this post a beautiful example of the way in which ‘clunky-ness’ in life can bring sweetness and delight. I wondered where the notion of friction came from, I wondered why people felt more comfortable with ‘friction’ than ‘relinquishment’ or ‘abstinence’ or plain old ‘difficulty’. The renunciant’s path is alive and well in monastic life with the taking of vows to renounce the comfortable life. When I did a 3 year retreat, I did not warm to renunciation straight away, I preferred it when my abbot told me to ‘practice sense-restraint’ – it seemed less antiquated and somehow more doable!

Maybe this is what is going on with friction; adding friction to your life, does feel more modern than giving up creature comforts. Yet, popular culture really gets the inevitable end point of the ‘frictionless life’. Have you seen Wall-e and its fat people? A favourite book by David Whiteland summed it up well back in 2000,

‘You should never underestimate the power of comfort. To our everlasting discredit, we owe our utter dependency on technology to our inability to resist it.’

My search led me to cognitive friction. Alan Cooper coined the term in 1999 and defined it as: “the resistance encountered by a human intellect when it engages with a complex system of rules.” If cues don’t match our expectations, we experience cognitive friction. Avoiding cognitive friction in UI design has been a design mantra in software design at least since the term was coined if not before. We get frustrated when interfaces don’t function seamlessly, and the aim is always to overcome cognitive friction in software. Of course, the flip side of the lack of friction is that we build unconscious habit and let our fingers do the walking, as we open Twitter for the Nth time in an hour without ever intending to…and stay there catching up with nothing.

I searched for the benefits of cognitive friction in health and well being, and could find very little on the google, a potential PhD for somebody scanning for research ideas? John and D’Arcy offer first person inquiry into how their mental wellbeing is benefitting by building friction into their interaction with software. The Space app benefits from our emerging ability to see value in friction – generally we call it a pain in the ass and want it gone, we want instant gratification…except sometimes.

Here at the Still Web, we have worked with the idea of challenging comfort and creating friction as offering a way out of that monkey mind since we set up the web site. Comfort is a lie or at least it is not something we should keep on pursuing uncritically as a society.

Creating friction intentionally maybe something we can sign up to more easily than relinquishing comfort and ease; and maybe becoming a consideration in software design going forward, as shown by our Space App example above.

May be those monastics through the ages telling us to sit with discomfort, relinquish comfort and become renunciants to gain enlightenment do still have something to teach us as we add a little intentional friction into our work flows. Buddhists monks know that ‘renunciation is a skill’,

“Buddhism takes a familiar American principle — the pursuit of happiness — and inserts two important qualifiers. The happiness it aims at is true: ultimate, unchanging, and undeceitful. Its pursuit of that happiness is serious, not in a grim sense, but dedicated, disciplined, and willing to make intelligent sacrifices. What sort of sacrifices are intelligent? The Buddhist answer to this question resonates with another American principle: an intelligent sacrifice is any in which you gain a greater happiness by letting go of a lesser one, in the same way you’d give up a bag of candy if offered a pound of gold in exchange. In other words, an intelligent sacrifice is like a profitable trade.”

Maybe intentional friction will lead us to ‘the pot of gold’ of equanimity as we face our modern busy lives. I am reminded of my reading of McLuhan. What does the frictionless life flip into when pushed to its limits? Intentional Cognitive Friction, maybe?

“Too much of anything, however sweet, will bring the opposite of whatever you thought you were getting. One becomes many, many become one. You start out a consumer and you end up consumed. The trick is to recognise the pattern before it is complete.”

February 25, 2018
In praise of slow walking

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When on Raasay I did some slow walking. Raasay is a beautiful Scottish island, it is silent and there are no crowds on the roads.

Slow walking is paying attention to the path, the verges of the road and the surroundings.

I listen to the sounds of water and birds; to use my binoculars I have to stand still. I watch the hills for deer, then a golden eagle flies above me. Crows chase the eagle away.

I prefer to do slow walking on my own. Walking in company could be very pleasant, but slow walking is a solitary act.

I love to take photos when walking. It channels my attention to the visible here and now but even without a camera one could have this kind of attention. We can use our eyes as if we are looking for a photography subject.

Cheers to the people who maintain the paths. Thanks for the stepping stones they provide for, the small bridges and crossings to climb over fences.

Crossing By @jaapsoft

Slow walking is only about walking. Walking is “an sich” (a ‘thing-in-itself ‘as defined in Kantian philosophy). The destination is not the most important part of the journey.

Slow walking is enjoying moments.

There is no app for slow walking, no phone is needed…and if somebody did make an app, then it would count neither steps nor time…

Maybe elderly people slow walk not just because they cannot go fast? And youngsters too can choose to walk slowly or take a stroll.

May 8, 2017
I am so tired, I can’t stop scrolling
I recently watched Alexa Clay’s Futurist Amish.

I found her ideas profound and thought provoking; Some things in life are like buttermilk, they should be enjoyed as they are and not improved upon. Amen to that. She also tells us that a digital detox is not the answer to a healthy approach to technology or nostalgia for days gone by. The answer ( or an answer) is intentional technology – we need to ask the ‘why’ of technology. Purpose matters to healthy use. Amen to that too.

Alexa also reminded me about a common cycle with new technology: we first feel a sense of wonder or awe at a new artefact that allows us to x, where x equals something we could not do before or could not do easily at least. I know that feeling. Yet, over time with overuse, or non-intentional use, we become like Zombies driven by it. She uses a fairly memorable image to explore how can end up relating to technology , all we can think about is how can to escape our fate… hence the digital detox seems the only answer.

I do remember that feeling of wonder and awe. I still feel it with certain new ‘toys’ I come across that enable something that seems impossible or almost magical. Yet, all this talk about digital detox and digital Sabbaths does show that, for many of us, there is nothing terribly magical about the relationship we have created with technology.

In the video, Alexa speaks to platform design issues, she asks about the ways we can we may design software that makes us more human rather than turn us into zombies. The skeptic in me believes this will not happen, no matter how many idealists suggest it, until it becomes economically viable.

Yet the buttermilk idea juxtaposed with the grasping zombie stayed in mind.

It got me thinking about final causes, why we do what we do. Alexa reminds us that when we talk about technology in terms of what it produces, we forget to ask what its products are for. The telos or end of something. She says ‘purpose matters’.

Another blog post came to my attention about the same time as the video: What does this thing called Twitter do? The post works with McLuhan’s 4 Laws of Media to inquire into the impact of Twitter on personal life. Sheridan (1990) asserts that the 4 laws of media are ‘the most comprehensive and capable framework that has been developed so far whereby to evaluate the impacts and implications of new technologies.’ I thought this was worth exploring a little further; I have been intending to read McLuhan in depth for a while and now I had the time.

McLuhan’s effects or laws to analyse any medium or artefact can be found on the google in many different forms,

The Twitter blog post is an example of using these questions for reflection, but removed from the context of McLuhan’s work. I think this is a very limited use for a framework that needs deep attention to be grasped and is certainly so much more than four simple questions.

As I read McLuhan, critics and fans, I see that people interpret the questions very differently.

Importantly, the way the questions are used in the diagram above and on the Twitter blog post neglect to speak about the ground to his questions. I came to grasp that McLuhan’s laws cannot be understood linearly. I close read the Laws of Media several times. It was a joyous and difficult read. The figure/ground relationship was key to understanding the 4 questions which he calls a Tetrad, as was the idea of simultaneous tetrads.

As I took time to read the book (an old PDF on my kindle, actually) I also noticed the Zombie relationship emerging in my use of social media in particular.

I noticed that people and information were starting to blend together online; that scrolling seemed to have become a substitute for the effort of conversation. I was so tired, hence no energy for the effort of real conversation, that I could not stop scrolling as I pretended to myself that this was real connection; precious attention drawn to a name I know, 14o characters, a short response or even easier just a like. The more I scrolled the more weary I got and the more like a zombie I felt. I am okay with that when what I scroll is just information; heck, I have spent a lifetime in academia feeling weary about information I can never catch up with. I am not okay with scrolling relationships that matter to me personally. One effect of social media for me is that the boundary between conversation and information seem to blur. I wanted to understand the weariness better.

How could I apply ‘the most comprehensive and capable framework’ to my use of technology?

What does Twitter flips into, when pushed, in my own use of it? I was curious to learn more.

Each of us needs to identify for ourselves what wears us out and what preserves that sense of wonder in our use of technology. I wanted to shape a few questions more precisely and less simplistically than ‘Do I need a digital detox?’.

We seek balance between the analogue and the digital in life. The idea holds a kind of magical appeal; yet it seems just a myth to me; compartmentalising our analogue and digital life is simply not possible: email, smartphones, working across time zones, multiple uses for our devices from making art to virtual offices… I wonder if instead of endorsing the analogue-digital balance myth, we may be better off working towards integration. This is why reading McLuhan’s Laws of Media as questions out of context is just wrong, or at least it was never his intent that we should turn them into mere linear explantion.

The best short introduction I have found that does justice to the book is a video,

https://youtu.be/9Vem4aKGQOE

And I strongly encourage anyone interested to watch the full video: it is called: McLuhans Wake, by Kevin McMahon (2002) but rights belong to Primitive Entertainment, so there may be issues finding it. Here is a link from the Wayback Machine.

McLuhan was most interested in formal cause, and in searching for pattern he offers us a sense of how media works beyond content: ‘Too much of anything, however sweet, will bring the opposite of whatever you thought you were getting. One becomes many, many become one. You start out a consumer and you end up consumed. The trick is to recognise the pattern before it is complete.” Instead, we tend to look at what an artefact enhances, forget the 3 other elements of the simultaneous tetrad and create false narratives that the latest artefact will finally bring world peace or whatever utopia we happen to be attached to.

McLuhan said: ‘Nothing is inevitable provided we are prepared to pay attention’. We know that here on the Still Web and work to offer resources to train the attention to enable intentionality rather than inevitability. It is human to filter out data and create figure from ground that then becomes fixed…until it fails or, in McLuhan’s words, until the pattern is complete. We do not like patterns completing and recognising the pattern before it is complete, requires trained attention and a still mind.

We need to commit to an ongoing inquiry, to an intentional use of technology. We can choose to use technology to become more aware of how habits form and break or not. My personal inquiry in the last month has led me to a few probes I will be using to engage with technology going forward,
1. the medium affects the quality of our ‘why’ – purpose matters
2. the point of practice is to practise
3. you need to break a habit to notice a habit
4. things take time, it is that simple. If faster, stuff in background suffers. If slower more of the background can emerge in the foreground.
5. creating time the hear oneself beyond the ‘they-self’ of social media offers a different experience from the ‘discarnate’ self online McLuhan predicted many years ago
6. salvation or damnation narratives do not serve us; understanding the parameters that lead to our mental well being and taking a long hard look at the way we are living, does.
Inquiring into all this, may require us to create what McLuhan called an anti-environment. We do not notice habit until we are forced to break it. He saw art as new perception: ‘Art as an anti-environment is an indispensable means of perception for environments, as such, are imperceptible.’ He quotes Von Humbolt to show how we are ensnared by the words we create,

A digital detox can be only a start not an end in itself. As of today, I am not tired and I have stopped scrolling like a zombie. I will keep on working daily towards healthy integration.

“To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological forms is necessarily to embrace it. By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servo-mechanisms” (McLuhan 1964)

I see a more useful depiction of the simultaneous tetrad like this,

It all belongs and will follow the cycle. We cannot hold it all in consciousness but we can keep practising.

References

Sheridan, William. 1990. The Paradigm Shift of the Information Age. Literary Review.

McLuhan, M., & McLuhan, E. (1992). Laws of media: The new science. University of Toronto Press.
September 4, 2016
The art of just watching

According to Cornelis Verhoeven, a Dutch philosopher, action-orientation is the belief in the necessity of activity alongside the rejection of passivity. Action oriented people believe that it is better to do something than wait passively for action to emerge from a given situation. Loafing is regarded by these ‘activistische ideologen en moralisten’ (activist ideologues and moralists) as almost criminal behaviour.

Action oriented people can even get angry when they see loafing in others.

Verhoeven believes people caught in action-orienation feel they can always succeed through action. There is nothing that seems to challenge humans more than their incapacity to act; such things as watching TV, playing games or just hanging around are seen mostly as bad habits. Our world today assumes we should always be ‘doing’ something useful.

We have come to consider focus and action as “good,” and idleness or loafing as “bad” or unproductive.

It is mostly true that we tend to feel guilty if we spend time doing nothing. In turn, Verhoeven sees action oriented people as blasé, as wanting to deny the value of any delay between wonderment and answer. He writes about the value of wonderment and about ‘the art of just watching’. Action orientation prefers a quick solution, even when it entails doing violence or forcing a given situation, above patience and emergence as an approach to life. Yet, ‘the word is very important, it is a delay between thought an action’. We should, therefore, take time with words as these are a ‘middle position between thought and action’.

He talks about the importance of ‘just considering’ and ‘just watching’.

Design by @mdvfunes Licensed CCBY

Verhoeven writes that as a philosopher he does not want to change the world; considering and watching is not only the opposite of action orientation. It is not the kind of watching of a person driving a car, for example, nor is it leering or spying.

Just watching, as understood by Verhoeven, has no other purpose than itself. It is an act free of purpose, never a productive force.

He talks about his approach as a “philosophy of the seventh day” – understood in the traditional way as the day we do not work.

Although Verhoeven has no lack of official recognition of his talent in his country of origin, he remained largely unknown to the general public during his life.

May be because his philosophy did not fit with our modern action-orientated ethos? Perhaps our world has little vocabulary left for what counts but cannot be counted and no time left to just watch without a purpose.

Watch an interview with Cornelis Verhoeven after he’d won the P.C. Hooftprice for literature and was interviewed by somebody who had never heard of him.

April 2, 2016
The still web recycles

Animated Gif by @mdvfunes CCBY

The Daily Stillness has now been going for 6 months!

When it launched at the end of July last year it was an experiment and we did not know how long we would keep it going or if a short daily practice to find stillness and attention in the midst of a busy life could work as intended. We only have a few regular users and some of my students from last year still visit at times. As I am running the Mindful Communication course again this semester, we have decided to keep it going until we can celebrate a birthday, at least! We want a Daily Stillness Cake!

One thing that has bothered me about the Daily Template we are using is that we keep generating a new daily practice each day. It seems to me that, in the context of the Still Web at least, to fan the fad of feeding our seeking addiction with a new practice each day is one way we are not enacting what we describe: the need to be still as well as in motion.

Part of the ethos of the Still Web is to stay with ‘the old’ and learn from it, as well as enjoying ‘the new’. The practices we explore in the Daily Stillness are intended to be done each day, not to be done once and thrown away.

Enter the Daily Recycler: See the little icon? ‘Recycle’ this daily stillness!

Alan Levine, my co-pilot here at the Still Web, listens well and likes tinkering with WordPress. He made me a recycler so that I can run the same or similar dailies as I see fit. I love that little button. It speaks to the point of practice being just that: to practise. Any one of the daily practices can be done regularly and cannot be deepened with just one try, so we will recycle a few from now on. This will also achieve a practical aim: sometimes I am just unable to think of a new practice! The recycler is an aid in those moments of writer’s block, I can always adapt an ‘old’ one.

Philosophically I am happy too. The Still Web recycles, takes time with ideas and deepens them in repetition. Deep learning as well as surfing the web for ideas. Thank you, Alan (aka @cogdog).

Source: Wikimedia Commons

January 29, 2016
(Re)Learning to read

One way to read with more attention and more care is using the Book Journal.

You need a notebook and a pen at hand when you are reading. You read with the intention to write down at least one sentence of the book. The Daily Stillness recently published tips about slow reading. Slow reading aims to reconnect us with our love of reading. Wiki-How offers a step by step guide to start you off creating a book journal.

It is possible to steer your attention or improve your focus with the help of a Book Journal. This little task of writing down a memorable sentence does help to read slower and with more attention. Taking notes is a way to improve your attention and retention of the material you read. We tend to highlight and reread passively at best, research shows that it is effortful retrieval that helps us learn; taking time to read, recall and write our own interpretation of what we read. John Dunlosky a renowned researcher in this area can tell you more if you are interested in this research.

I use a paper notebook to write sentences down, as I find that using a phone or tablet would distract me from reading. You know that these devices distract you from reading, even just hearing a notification that you do not respond to has been shown to be distracting.

I keep this Book Journal close to my favorite reading place. I try to use my fountain pen to write in my Book Journal because that makes it more like a diary, I guess. Maybe you want to buy a very special notebook for your Book Journal. And sometimes when reading in other places I do use a post-it or a piece of paper for temporary storage. I used to travel a lot and always had a book to read with me.

My Book Journal is a real treasure. One sentence in the Book Journal can make me remember the whole book.

Sometimes I can use the quotes in speeches or when I write a letter on a special occasion. I started the Book Journal in 1993 and now I am writing a second one because the first is full of quotes. When I wrote my own book I was very happy I added the date of reading, title and author to my quotes and notes so I could use them in my writing. I also often added the page number of a quote. All very helpful to my own writing later.

One citation from my Book Journal:

“Of course, in order to practice this style of reading as an art, one thing is above all essential—something that today has been thoroughly forgotten (and so it will require still more time before my writings are “readable”) — something for which one almost needs to be a cow, at any rate not a modern man — rumination.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of moral, prologue.

Source of images: Book Girl Reading Book with Post-its

December 11, 2015
Holding the tension of opposites

November 26, 2015
Silence and creativity

The creative thinking process requires the silent pause.

After a first phase of thinking about a new idea I need some rest, I need incubation time. I often imagine the unconscious mind continues pondering during my silent incubation time. The brain and our intuition needs silence.

Intuition has a very tiny voice. You cannot hear it unless you take your time and be silent. Some problems are solved when I sleep. The next morning the solution is there.

When Archimedes did not know the solution to his problem he took a bath; relaxing in his bath he knew where to look for the answer. In ‘Zen and the art of motor maintenance’ making a cup of coffee is used as a way to be silent and let the mind work for itself to avoid the gumption trap.

The silent pause in the creative process help us maintain enthusiasm and energy flowing. Stress drains your energy and enthusiasm. It will kill your creativity. As Steven Johnson often reminds us: Chance favours the connected mind, connection needs the silent pause.

“True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.” ― Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks

November 21, 2015
You need self control to remain the master of your device

How does your device help you with self control and preventing stress and pain?

Source License CCBYNCSA

Recently on the Daily Stillness we explored apps to help digital stillness. One was called Pause to support mindfulness training and the other was called Self Control to help us focus when online. I saw the daily activities and wanted to share my own experience as a long time user of this kind of digital support. This guest post is about my experience.

Digital stillness apps could help you. At first, I used this type of app as prevention for repetitive strain injury (RSI).

I do spend lots of time on the computer. Writing books, doing internet research or writing on websites. I did get RSI because of all that internet work. It hurts a lot. It is painful. Medical help was required. I also needed a solution to continue writing without painful consequences. So I did some searches on internet, and found many resources.

I selected some apps to help me take time off and do my RSI exercises regularly. I tried a few and found a solution that fits me. Now I use AntiRsi. It is for OS X, source code is available and it does run on Ubuntu 14.04. As Wikipedia explains ‘AntiRSI is a program for OS X that helps prevent RSI (repetitive strain injury) and other computer related stress. It does so by forcing you to take regular breaks, yet without getting in the way. It also detects natural breaks.’ Another app called Self Control may be more what you need,

Set it for 4 hours, for instance, and your browser will behave as if it’s offline for that period of time. No amount of browser restarts or computer reboots will stop it. Before you have heart palpitations, know that you can whitelist or blacklist certain sites. So, rather than completely disabling the entire Internet, you can selectively decide which sites are OK, or not OK, to visit during your focus period. J.K. Glei

At first listening to the Self Control app was easy because I still suffered from RSI. I listened and took my pauses. Yet after some time the flow of my writing process kept me working, even if the Self Control App told me to stop. That was stupid of me. I had to ask for medical help again, but at least I did learn my lesson.

Now the AntiRsi app works better for me. I like the freedom in the preferences to adjust pause times. Now it is easy to finish a last sentence because the app does not block the computer. When I started using apps for support I needed one that blocked my computer and gave me no choice. I needed to be forced to stop. After I learnt my lesson when the RSI recurred I no longer need to be forced to stop, I will stop.

I also really like the application icon of the AntiRsi app in the dock, it is a little clock that shows the time left to work before a pause. Yet this type of app do not only protect me from health problems. The Self Control app made me leave the computer for a pause of about 8 minutes. In the pauses I do all kind of things. Making coffee, clean the house as I often work from home or care for the plants in the window or play my bass clarinet!

I did discover that those pauses were very profitable, because in the pause I did have time to think freely. My thoughts wandered when I was doing something else than working on the computer.

That is how I discovered The Secret of the Pause.

The slow and unguided thinking in the pause fosters creative ideas. Do you know that book about thinking slow and thinking fast?

The Self Control app is still on my computers, in case I forget to choose what helps my well being and creativity.

When people ask me to do something I take a pause before answering. My first thought is to help people and do what they ask me, but the Self Control app did teach me to ask for a pause and give the question some time to find an answer. Now I take some time and let text wait rather than publish it at once. It waits in draft mode for some time and that is just fine.

November 2, 2015
Daily Stillness launches tomorrow!
Alan and I have been working hard to get the Daily Stillness site up and running. We are launching tomorrow and we expect that there may be a few glitches as the site gets going. Help us make it better by telling us if anything is not working for you. Leave a comment.

Our intention is to offer daily reminders to attend to the rhythm of life through doing some kind of simple activity to help us pause.

Over time Stillness practice eases our fear of being alone with no distractions. The exercises will be about different things. We have created a set of categories that over time will cover different aspects of the ways in which we can connect with stillness daily:
- Art 4 stillness: Many of us have heard about the benefits of meditation, but sometimes find it hard to make the time for it in our day. Fewer of us know about the profound benefits of artistic expression. Creating art is a way to access a meditative state of mind and the profound healing it brings.
- Distraction Busting: Practices in this category are about learning to restrain your senses purposefully. This leads to relaxed focus of attention and the choice to sustain your attention on a given stimulus. As concentration develops, you learn to sit with the habits that make the ‘self’ and how these create distraction.
- Habit honesty box: These practices will help you learn about the many ways in which we are not as smart as we think we are. Looking at our habits honestly is hard as cognitive biases get in the way of us seeing out true habits. Digital life makes this easy to practice. The computer browser history does not lie in the way our mind does. We use our digital life to get more honest about how our habits get in the way of stillness.
- Interpersonal attention: “It’s the attention that counts: interpersonal attention fosters intimacy and social exchange” A title of one of the many studies in social psychology identifying attention as key to social exchanges. The challenges of offering interpersonal attention require us to practice empathy, being comfortable with silence and explore the ways in which these behaviour can be demonstrated in mediated online dialogue.
- Look at the way your are living: These practices will help you look at your lifestyle and how it helps or hinders stillness in your life. B. Alan Wallace talks about ‘human flourishing’ happening when we lead an altruistic life that is not dependent on external factors for happiness and well-being.
- Seeing Beyond: Practices to look inwards. We have so much to take in from our environment that we often forget to look in. Asking contemplative questions regularly can help us widen our perspective away from fixed views. This is about understanding the nature of life as impermanent, devoid of self and unsatisfactory – seeing beyond our desires for only getting our own way, helps still the mind from grasping.
We are starting with 30 days to Stillness which you can take as a course if that suits you. You can just do a few in the week. You can pick a random one or something from a specific category you want to practice. Use these resources as suits your needs. There is a a form on the site for you to submit suggestions for daily exercises and we hope that over time this submission box will be full of your ideas too. We aspire to create a a group of people who can learn together under the hashtag #stillweb on Twitter and on the site too. You can subscribe the the Daily Stillness on email or follow @livedtime on twitter to get the daily reminder. You reply to each day’s activity by tweeting to @livedtime and including the #tds tag associated with that day’s activity. You will need to create a Twitter account to reply there, but you can also respond on the comments on the site if Twitter is not for you.

If you want to know more about our thinking for the site, check out our About page.
June 30, 2015