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The Lingering Kit: Tools for a Day Off With No Output · Philosopheasy Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Try something for me while you listen.
0:03
SPEAKER_00: Take tomorrow afternoon the whole stretch from one o'clock to six.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: I will hand it to you with one rule.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: You can do anything you like with it,
0:12
SPEAKER_00: but at six,
0:13
SPEAKER_00: a stranger in a gray cardigan will sit down across from you
0:16
SPEAKER_00: and ask what you got done.
0:19
SPEAKER_00: Watch what happens to the afternoon.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: It starts to organize itself.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: The walk becomes a walk of a particular length.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: The book becomes forty pages.
0:30
SPEAKER_00: You find yourself choosing things that will sound good out loud.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: Now change the rule.
0:35
SPEAKER_00: The stranger still comes at six,
0:37
SPEAKER_00: but she only wants to know whether the afternoon was any good,
0:41
SPEAKER_00: and you may answer with a shrug.
0:43
SPEAKER_00: There is nothing to report.
0:45
SPEAKER_00: Notice what that does.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: For a lot of people, the second afternoon is the harder one.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: About twenty minutes in, a small itch starts.
0:55
SPEAKER_00: Shouldn't you be doing something with this?
0:58
SPEAKER_00: That itch is what this episode is about.
1:01
SPEAKER_00: Today we are with the German-Korean philosopher Byung Chul Han and a short book
1:06
SPEAKER_00: of his called The Scent of Time,
1:09
SPEAKER_00: which carries the subtitle of Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: It is a small, awkward book, and I have not finished arguing with it.
1:19
SPEAKER_00: It says that the trouble with your rest is not that you have too little of it.
1:23
SPEAKER_00: The trouble is what has happened to time itself.
1:27
SPEAKER_00: By the end of this part you will look differently at
1:29
SPEAKER_00: that Saturday you spent recovering,
1:32
SPEAKER_00: and you will have the old word for what it lacked.
1:35
SPEAKER_00: In the second part we turn that word into something you can do.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: Start with the ache, because you probably know it already.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: It is a Saturday ten past two.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: You have cleared the diary on purpose.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: Nobody needs anything.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: And you feel,
1:52
SPEAKER_00: faintly,
1:53
SPEAKER_00: like a person waiting for a train that is not on any board,
1:56
SPEAKER_00: so you do what capable people do.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: You fill the space with restoration.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: A stretch routine from a video,
2:05
SPEAKER_00: a long bath with a timer,
2:07
SPEAKER_00: a nap you set an alarm for because you cannot trust yourself to wake up unaided.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: At some point you glance at the sleep score on your wrist,
2:17
SPEAKER_00: 71, and feel mildly told off by your own body.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: By Sunday evening the rest has a strange texture.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: You did the things.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: You ticked, more or less, the boxes.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: And you feel like you've come off an unpaid shift.
2:32
SPEAKER_00: The weekday version is smaller.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: It is the lunch break at the desk.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: A sandwich in one hand.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: A ten-minute meditation on the phone in the other.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: With a street counter that now says 43 days.
2:45
SPEAKER_00: You are being calm at a target.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: If you miss a day the street breaks.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: And breaking the streak is somehow worse than not being calm at all.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: There is a bigger life version, too.
2:56
SPEAKER_00: A man I will call Walter retires at sixty-five after forty years in a freight office.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: For the first month he does what he promised himself.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: Walks a woodworking course,
3:08
SPEAKER_00: a trip with a printed itinerary that covers eleven days and has no gaps in it.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: In the second month,
3:15
SPEAKER_00: His wife finds him at the kitchen table at four in the afternoon,
3:18
SPEAKER_00: writing a list, a list of things to do tomorrow.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: He is in his own mind still at work.
3:25
SPEAKER_00: He has simply become his own employer, and a harsh one now.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: Think about the advice you have been given.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: Rest more.
3:33
SPEAKER_00: Switch off.
3:34
SPEAKER_00: Practice self-care.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: Protect your downtime.
3:38
SPEAKER_00: All of it is kindly meant, and all of it has the same hidden shape.
3:43
SPEAKER_00: Each one turns rest into something you do.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: Do well and can fall short of.
3:49
SPEAKER_00: Protect your downtime and downtime becomes a thing to guard, which is a job.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: Practice self-care and care becomes a practice with a schedule and a way of getting it wrong.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: The advice treats the exhaustion as a shortage of recovery.
4:06
SPEAKER_00: It never asks whether recovery, as we understand it, is the very thing that is not working.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: Think about the word itself.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: To recover is to get back to a level.
4:17
SPEAKER_00: Back to what?
4:18
SPEAKER_00: To the level at which you can produce again on Monday.
4:22
SPEAKER_00: Rest, in that sense, is maintenance, like oiling a machine.
4:26
SPEAKER_00: Nobody has ever felt rested by being oiled.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: So here is the cliffhanger, and it is a plain one.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: What if the reason the day off never arrives is not that you are doing it wrong,
4:37
SPEAKER_00: but that the time you are trying to rest in no longer has the property
4:41
SPEAKER_00: that rest needs?
4:43
SPEAKER_00: Han thinks that is what happened, and that we lost the property so slowly nobody noticed it.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: Go first the man himself, briefly.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: Byung Chul Han was born in Seoul in 1959.
4:57
SPEAKER_00: He began by studying metallurgy,
4:59
SPEAKER_00: the science of metals,
5:01
SPEAKER_00: and then in his twenties left Korea for Germany and changed course entirely
5:07
SPEAKER_00: to philosophy, literature, and theology.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: He wrote a doctorate on the philosopher Martin Heidegger and went on to teach
5:15
SPEAKER_00: in Karlsruhe and later in Berlin.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: He is known for short books,
5:20
SPEAKER_00: many of them barely a hundred pages,
5:23
SPEAKER_00: which is a pleasing joke for an author who writes about slowness.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: He is also known for being rather private.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: He gives few interviews and is said to keep a garden and play the piano,
5:35
SPEAKER_00: which, if you think about it, is a fairly good clue to his convictions.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: Now, the argument of the scent of time.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: Hans starts from a historical claim.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: Hans says people once lived inside time that had a shape.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: The year had festivals.
5:51
SPEAKER_00: The week had a rest day.
5:53
SPEAKER_00: A life had stages.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: And these were not just markers on a calendar.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: They gave events a place in a larger pattern so that a moment was not simply
6:03
SPEAKER_00: the next one but belonged to something.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: Pan calls this time with a rhythm or time with a direction.
6:10
SPEAKER_00: His claim is that this shape has come apart.
6:13
SPEAKER_00: Time now, he says, is a row of separate points, each one only a step toward the next.
6:19
SPEAKER_00: No point is allowed to stay.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: Each one only exists to be passed through.
6:25
SPEAKER_00: The book leans on one distinction.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: On one side is time that is a sequence of points,
6:31
SPEAKER_00: which we can call atomized time, meaning time cut into the smallest pieces.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: On the other is time that has duration,
6:40
SPEAKER_00: meaning time that lasts and has a thickness you can be inside of.
6:45
SPEAKER_00: The first kind can be counted.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: The second kind can only be dwelt in, and so we reach the core idea, said once and plainly.
6:54
SPEAKER_00: When time is cut into points, nothing can linger.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: And when nothing can linger, rest has nowhere to happen.
7:01
SPEAKER_00: All that is left is recovery.
7:04
SPEAKER_00: A pause between rounds of output.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: The cure is not a better schedule.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: It is the recovery of the old skill of lingering,
7:13
SPEAKER_00: which Hahn discusses under the German word verweilen,
7:16
SPEAKER_00: to stay a while with something and let it take the time it takes.
7:21
SPEAKER_00: Let us take the concepts one at a time.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: The first is point time.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: Think of a woman I will call Marguerite, waiting for a bus in the rain.
7:30
SPEAKER_00: She has an app that shows the bus as a small moving dot with a countdown beside it.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: Four minutes?
7:37
SPEAKER_00: Three minutes?
7:39
SPEAKER_00: Two?
7:40
SPEAKER_00: She watches the dot instead of the street.
7:43
SPEAKER_00: The wet bakery window.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: The man across the road struggling with an umbrella.
7:48
SPEAKER_00: The waiting has been reduced to a number falling toward zero.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: That is point time in miniature, the minutes before the bus are not lived.
7:57
SPEAKER_00: They are merely the distance between two points to be minimized.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: And notice that the app is a kindness.
8:04
SPEAKER_00: It makes her life more efficient.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: Anne's point is that this kind of efficiency empties the waiting, and most of a life is waiting.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: The second concept is lingering.
8:15
SPEAKER_00: Here the example is a retired postman,
8:18
SPEAKER_00: Tomas, who lives on the third floor of a block with no lift.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: On Sunday mornings he carries his coffee down to the stairwell landing,
8:27
SPEAKER_00: where there is a window facing the courtyard, and he stands there.
8:32
SPEAKER_00: He does not look at anything in particular.
8:34
SPEAKER_00: A neighbor's washing moves.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: A pigeon rearranges itself.
8:38
SPEAKER_00: After a while he goes back up.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: If you asked Tomas what he got out of it,
8:43
SPEAKER_00: he would not have an answer, and that is precisely the point.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: Hands lingering is not a technique for producing calm.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: It is a way of being with something without asking it to be useful.
8:55
SPEAKER_00: The linger has no destination, so it cannot fall short of one.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: That changes what the itch means.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: The itch says, shouldn't you be doing something?
9:06
SPEAKER_00: Lingering is the practice of not answering the question.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: The third concept gives the book its name, the scent of time.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: Unuses scent as an image for the way a thing carries its duration with it.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: Smell is slow.
9:21
SPEAKER_00: It does not arrive as a sharp sign the way an image does.
9:26
SPEAKER_00: It seeps,
9:27
SPEAKER_00: it lingers,
9:27
SPEAKER_00: and it brings the past with it,
9:29
SPEAKER_00: which is why a certain soap or a certain kind of old wool can place you in
9:33
SPEAKER_00: a hallway thirty years ago.
9:35
SPEAKER_00: So take a woman I will call Ines,
9:38
SPEAKER_00: who opens her late mother's coat cupboard and finds the smell of the house
9:41
SPEAKER_00: of her childhood, camphor and cold air and something sweet underneath.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: For a moment, the ears do not sit in a row.
9:49
SPEAKER_00: They are all in the cupboard at once.
9:52
SPEAKER_00: That is what Han means by time having a scent.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: Time is something dense and layered,
9:58
SPEAKER_00: which you can stand inside, as opposed to time as a line of dots.
10:03
SPEAKER_00: You can't scroll a smell.
10:05
SPEAKER_00: The fourth concept brings us back to your Saturday.
10:09
SPEAKER_00: Han argues that in a world of point time, free time is not really free.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: It is defined by its relation to work,
10:16
SPEAKER_00: It is the pit stop in the race, and a pit stop is a thing the race needs.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: Even the holiday,
10:26
SPEAKER_00: he suggests,
10:27
SPEAKER_00: becomes a phase of the working life,
10:30
SPEAKER_00: the time we take off in order to be fit to go back on.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: Consider a young designer, Aiko, on the first Saturday of a hard month.
10:39
SPEAKER_00: She goes to bed early the night before,
10:41
SPEAKER_00: so that she can wake early,
10:42
SPEAKER_00: so that she can run,
10:44
SPEAKER_00: so that she can eat properly,
10:46
SPEAKER_00: so that by Sunday night she will be, in her own phrase, reset.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: Every item on that list is pleasant.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: Every item also points at Monday.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: The day has no inside.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: It is a corridor to Monday, and she walks it dutifully and arrives tired.
11:03
SPEAKER_00: One more thing about Aiko.
11:05
SPEAKER_00: She does not feel she is working.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: That is why the exhaustion is so confusing.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: Nobody is making her do it.
11:13
SPEAKER_00: The pressure has moved inside, and it speaks in her own voice, in the language of well-being.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: Put the four together, and the picture is complete.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: Point time cuts the day into steps.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: Rest is squeezed into recovery.
11:29
SPEAKER_00: Lingering the one thing that would give a day an inside looks to everyone like wasted time.
11:34
SPEAKER_00: And the scent,
11:35
SPEAKER_00: the thickness,
11:36
SPEAKER_00: the sense that an hour has a body,
11:38
SPEAKER_00: drains away until all you can say about a Saturday is how much you got through.
11:43
SPEAKER_00: Again, more simply,
11:45
SPEAKER_00: your time has been chopped into moments,
11:48
SPEAKER_00: and each moment is only a doorway to the next one.
11:52
SPEAKER_00: Rest needs a stretch of time that lasts, one you can stay inside.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: When the stretch is gone,
11:59
SPEAKER_00: all that is left to offer you is recovery,
12:01
SPEAKER_00: which is a pause that exists for the sake of what comes after it.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: Though the Saturday on a schedule is not a mistake in your character,
12:09
SPEAKER_00: it is what rest looks like when time has no thickness.
12:13
SPEAKER_00: Now a word about blame, because you may be carrying some.
12:18
SPEAKER_00: If you have ever felt that you are bad at weekends,
12:21
SPEAKER_00: that other people seem to lie on a sofa and simply be restored
12:26
SPEAKER_00: while you sit there planning the sofa, please put that down.
12:30
SPEAKER_00: You did not invent this.
12:33
SPEAKER_00: You were handed a clock that counts in points,
12:35
SPEAKER_00: an economy that pays for output,
12:38
SPEAKER_00: and a well-being industry that sells you rest in measurable units.
12:43
SPEAKER_00: You made a sensible response to the conditions.
12:46
SPEAKER_00: The itch you feel at twenty past two on a free afternoon is not weakness.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: It is the sound of a trained habit looking for its task.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: That does not mean nothing can be done.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: It means the thing to do is smaller and stranger than another resolution.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: Let us move to the practice and start with the hardest part of the idea.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: The hardest part is this.
13:10
SPEAKER_00: You cannot make yourself linger by effort, and you cannot do it by measuring.
13:16
SPEAKER_00: Lingering that is tracked is just another point.
13:19
SPEAKER_00: The moment you ask whether you are doing it well, you have left it.
13:24
SPEAKER_00: That is a real difficulty.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: And Han does not pretend otherwise.
13:28
SPEAKER_00: You cannot get to lingering by optimizing your way there.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: What you can do is arrange the conditions and then get out of the way.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: Think of sleep.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: You cannot will it.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: You can only dim the room and stop trying.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: Here is a short test to find where you stand.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: Three questions, and you do not need to answer aloud.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: First, the last time you had a free hour, did you decide in advance what it was for?
13:55
SPEAKER_00: Second, when it ended,
13:57
SPEAKER_00: was your first thought about what you had done with it, or about how it had felt?
14:02
SPEAKER_00: Third, if someone had asked you,
14:05
SPEAKER_00: halfway through,
14:07
SPEAKER_00: what you were up to, would you have been slightly embarrassed to say nothing?
14:12
SPEAKER_00: If you said yes to the first, the hour was spoken for before it began.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: If you leaned toward what you had done, you were reading the hour as a report.
14:22
SPEAKER_00: And if the third one stung,
14:23
SPEAKER_00: you have met the itch face to face, and it is worth being a little kind to it.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: It is a guard dog still barking at a burglar who left years ago.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: Now let us try something together, right here, and it will take about a minute.
14:39
SPEAKER_00: Wherever you are, stay put.
14:41
SPEAKER_00: Do not reach for anything.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: Pick one object within your sight, any object at all.
14:48
SPEAKER_00: A mug, a window ledge, the corner of a bookcase.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: Look at it without trying to learn anything.
14:55
SPEAKER_00: You are not studying it.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: You are keeping it company.
14:59
SPEAKER_00: Notice that a small voice will offer you a thought about what to do next.
15:03
SPEAKER_00: Let the thought go past, the way a car goes past a window.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: You do not have to argue with it.
15:11
SPEAKER_00: Stay a little longer than is comfortable.
15:13
SPEAKER_00: See whether the object changes.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: Often there is a detail you had not noticed, a chip in the glaze or a grain in the wood.
15:22
SPEAKER_00: You will not be told it is useful.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: Just notice that the minute had an inside.
15:27
SPEAKER_00: That is all.
15:28
SPEAKER_00: Lingering is at its smallest.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: It is not relaxation, and it is not meditation with a goal.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: It is staying with something for no reason long enough for it to show you its own length.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: So what is Han's way out?
15:44
SPEAKER_00: It is not a method, which would be a joke on his own argument.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: It is a change of direction.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: Where point time rushes you toward the next moment,
15:53
SPEAKER_00: he asks us to recover forms of life that have duration,
15:56
SPEAKER_00: ritual, festival, a pace of attention that lets a thing take the time it takes.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: He is known for a garden, and it is no accident.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: A garden cannot be hurried and does not report back.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: Whatever happens in it happens on its own schedule,
16:13
SPEAKER_00: and the gardener's job is mostly to be there.
16:17
SPEAKER_00: You may have objections.
16:19
SPEAKER_00: Let me take three that I would raise myself.
16:22
SPEAKER_00: The first objection is that this is a luxury.
16:25
SPEAKER_00: Some people have a free Saturday, and some have two jobs and a child with a temperature.
16:31
SPEAKER_00: Fair.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: Han's idea is not that everyone gets the same quantity of time.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: It is about the quality of whatever scraps you do have.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: Ten minutes on a stairwell landing with a coffee and a window counts as lingering.
16:45
SPEAKER_00: A long day with a timetable does not.
16:47
SPEAKER_00: Lingering is cheap in money and expensive only in the willingness to be unproductive.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: The second objection is that without goals nothing would get done,
16:57
SPEAKER_00: but nobody is proposing you live entirely in a haze.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: Work has its place, and goals are useful tools.
17:05
SPEAKER_00: The claim is narrower.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: Some portion of your time should be exempt from being a tool because
17:11
SPEAKER_00: a life made only of tools has no one left inside it to use them.
17:16
SPEAKER_00: The third objection is the sharpest.
17:18
SPEAKER_00: Isn't this just another wellness tip lingering for the sake of feeling better?
17:24
SPEAKER_00: Yes, it can become that.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: And if it does, it stops working.
17:30
SPEAKER_00: If you linger in order to be more productive on Monday,
17:33
SPEAKER_00: you have only invented a cleverer pit stop.
17:37
SPEAKER_00: The honest test is whether you would still do it if you were told it would improve nothing.
17:42
SPEAKER_00: That is uncomfortable, and I think it is meant to be.
17:45
SPEAKER_00: Third time, as short as I can make it, time that is cut into points cannot be rested in.
17:52
SPEAKER_00: What it can be is recovered from.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: To rest you need duration,
17:56
SPEAKER_00: and duration comes back only when you spend some time on nothing in particular.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: Now the practice.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: It is small on purpose.
18:05
SPEAKER_00: And you can try it this coming weekend.
18:08
SPEAKER_00: Step 1.
18:09
SPEAKER_00: Choose one stretch of time no longer than an hour and give it no purpose.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: Decide the day before so that the choosing is not itself an event.
18:18
SPEAKER_00: Do not tell it what it is for.
18:21
SPEAKER_00: Step 2.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: Take off the measuring tools.
18:24
SPEAKER_00: The step counter, the screen timer, the watch that tells you how well you slept.
18:30
SPEAKER_00: Leave them in a drawer.
18:32
SPEAKER_00: If you want to know the time, look at an ordinary clock.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: And only once.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: Step three.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: Pick one thing to be near, not to do.
18:41
SPEAKER_00: A window, a tree, a pan of soup on a low heat, a neighbor's washing line.
18:48
SPEAKER_00: Be near it the way you would sit with a friend who does not need entertaining.
18:52
SPEAKER_00: Step four.
18:54
SPEAKER_00: When the itch arrives,
18:55
SPEAKER_00: and it will,
18:56
SPEAKER_00: probably about twenty minutes in,
18:58
SPEAKER_00: name it, say to yourself, there is the itch, do not obey it, and do not fight it.
19:04
SPEAKER_00: Let it be there like weather.
19:06
SPEAKER_00: It usually fades before it wins.
19:09
SPEAKER_00: Step 5.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: When the hour ends, do not review it.
19:14
SPEAKER_00: Do not ask what you got out of it.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: If you must ask anything, ask only whether it felt long or short, thick or thin.
19:24
SPEAKER_00: Then go and do whatever comes next.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: Now, what if it feels uncomfortable?
19:29
SPEAKER_00: It may.
19:30
SPEAKER_00: You may feel bored,
19:31
SPEAKER_00: restless,
19:32
SPEAKER_00: a little guilty,
19:33
SPEAKER_00: even faintly frightened,
19:35
SPEAKER_00: because an empty hour can show you things the busy ones were covering.
19:39
SPEAKER_00: That is normal, and it does not mean you are doing it wrong.
19:43
SPEAKER_00: Start smaller.
19:45
SPEAKER_00: Ten minutes will do.
19:47
SPEAKER_00: Stay in a place where you can leave, and let yourself leave if you need to.
19:51
SPEAKER_00: If the quiet brings up something heavy,
19:54
SPEAKER_00: or the restlessness stays for weeks and starts to feel like low mood or worse,
19:59
SPEAKER_00: Talk to someone you trust or a doctor.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: Lingering is a gentle practice, and it is not a replacement for care.
20:07
SPEAKER_00: Let us go back to that afternoon, one to six, and the stranger in the gray cardigan.
20:13
SPEAKER_00: Imagine now you have lived a few weekends with this.
20:17
SPEAKER_00: The stranger arrives at six and asks,
20:20
SPEAKER_00: as she always does,
20:21
SPEAKER_00: whether the afternoon was any good, and you do not scramble for a list.
20:26
SPEAKER_00: You say that you sat for a while on the back step That the light went
20:29
SPEAKER_00: a funny yellow around four.
20:31
SPEAKER_00: That a blackbird kept returning to the same patch of lawn.
20:35
SPEAKER_00: You say you did not do much.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: She nods.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: She does not write anything down.
20:41
SPEAKER_00: And notice what has changed.
20:43
SPEAKER_00: The afternoon no longer looks like a debt that needed paying.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: It has an inside now.
20:49
SPEAKER_00: You were there for it.
20:50
SPEAKER_00: I will say one thing for myself.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: I am no better at this than anyone.
20:56
SPEAKER_00: And when I tried it,
20:57
SPEAKER_00: The second afternoon was the hard one,
20:59
SPEAKER_00: and I checked the time far more often than I would admit.
21:03
SPEAKER_00: So to gather it up,
21:04
SPEAKER_00: Hans says our time has been cut into points,
21:07
SPEAKER_00: so that rest has shrunk into recovery for the next round of output.
21:11
SPEAKER_00: The old skill that was lost is lingering,
21:14
SPEAKER_00: staying with something for no reason until it shows its own length.
21:18
SPEAKER_00: The practice is one unmeasured hour,
21:21
SPEAKER_00: one thing to be near,
21:22
SPEAKER_00: no report at the end, and a kind eye on the itch when it comes.
21:27
SPEAKER_00: If you would like to answer something underneath this episode, here is a plain question.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: What is the smallest thing you could stay near for ten minutes this week,
21:37
SPEAKER_00: with nothing to show for it afterwards?
21:40
SPEAKER_00: This month's live masterclass is open to you as a member,
21:43
SPEAKER_00: so if you want to work on this with other people in the room, come along.
21:48
SPEAKER_00: Go and stand at a window for a bit.