Earthquakes, Hurricanes, and Stillness

On Tuesday I was sitting on the couch editing my chapter on Atwood's Surfacing and felt a slight rumble. Here in Conway, Massachusetts you might believe this to be a unique occurrence, but energy has an odd way of working around here - some folks are just used to quakes, whether they manifest as spiritual, emotional or physical jolts. I was interested by the academics who posted on Facebook that they believed the quake was simply a manifestation of the momentum or angst that end of summer writing can produce. At our solitary work stations, sometimes we can forget the movement and flexibility required to study and write. My struggle, and maybe some of yours, is to find the middle ground between movement and stillness, peripatetic anxiety and boring stasis. The energetic bumps in the night are just reminders of this need for balance.

As academia becomes more market-driven, and we frantically scramble to prove our expertise in the form of conference papers, articles, books, blog posts, etc., it might be useful to consider the Classical foundations of scholarly life. The work of the mind for centuries, if not millennium, has often been paired with physical activity and spiritual contemplation. Greek philosophers often comment on Socrates walking in contemplation, or standing for days at a time, without moving, in the face of a literal military siege. Montaigne confesses that he has a quick and steady walk, but he "knows not which of the two, my mind or my body, I have had more difficulty in keeping in one place." The balance between cognitive and physical movement and our capacity for stillness appears to be an enduring challenge. This week, as I struggled to stay sitting and finish a chapter draft, I found there was nothing better than taking a long walk in the middle of the day to shore up my creative energy and revive my focus for further contemplation.

And so we might consider the impending hurricane as a test of this balance between stillness and movement. I'm happily holed up in Massachusetts and will be waiting out the storm at a retreat center Tsegyalgar East with Jess. We are both thinking of our friends and family in New York, however, who will have to endure a lack of mobility this weekend, and face the frightening absence of public transportation. Perhaps we can think of this storm as Mother Nature's way of reminding us to practice being still. She asks us to take a break from our harried daily routine, sit without our laptops, our cell phones, and our grab-bag of worries, and to be present to the constant wanderings of our inner selves that we often ignore or take for granted. Be restful friends, and remember, the subway will be closed only for a little while.