We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, “here and now” without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.

José Ortega y Gasset
Mission of the University (Transaction, 1992), 63.

Detail from 'Young Man at Prayer' by Hans Memling (Wikimedia Commons)

Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset spelled out the problem this way in his book Mission of the University: “The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, ‘here and now’ without any possible postponement.” And then he uses a metaphor far more violent than fists: “Life is fired at us point-blank.”

Another philosopher and artist, Wyndham Lewis, gets at the same thing in the 1957 preface to his book Time and Western Man: “Everything in our life today conspires to thrust most people into prescribed tracks, in what can be called a sort of trance of action.”

That trance of action comes at a huge cost: “Hurrying, without any significant reason, from spot to spot at the maximum speed obtainable, drugged in that mechanical activity, how is the typical individual of this epoch to do some detached thinking for himself? All his life is disposed with a view to banishing reflection.” Time to think, to contemplate, to find inner calm in the hubbub is lost.

My suspicion is that it’s truer now than when either Ortega y Gasset or Lewis wrote. Schedules, regimens, agendas, infoclutter, datagluts, distractions. There’s more to keep up with now than at any other time in history. I regularly start my day one moment and then look up to find it’s already three in the afternoon. Sometimes I hardly know where the day has gone. I find myself trapped in that trance of action where everything is urgent and relentless. And just like Lewis said, I’ve lost opportunity for detached thinking and reflection. It’s all busyness and no calm.

But I think my suspicion is probably bunk. Scottish minister Andrew Bonar made a related observation about distraction. He said that

one of the gravest perils which besets the ministry is a restless scattering of energies over an amazing multiplicity of interests which leaves no margin of time and of strength for receptive and absorbing communion with God.

Bonar died in 1892. He was concerned with church life, but the overlap with Ortega y Gasset and Lewis is pretty clear.

Our “multiplicity of interests” yanks us off the contemplative, meditative path. That it can happen as easily in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries says more about our inherent lack of discipline than our increasingly stimuli-rich environments.

We can filter those; we do it reflexively all the time. I think the trick is being intentional about it—filling that filtered space and time with something singular and substantive. Philosopher Immanuel Kant started each day with a few cups of tea and his pipe. According to biographer Manfred Kuehn, “The time he needed for smoking it ‘was devoted to meditation.’” Bonar similarly made prayer and meditation central to his day.

Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton said that “Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves” (Thoughts in Solitude).

So what if we stopped?

(Preaching to myself here:) Stepping outside the “prescribed tracks” and snapping out of the “trance of action” to collect our minds, gather the loose threads of thought, and regain focus is crucial if we have any hope of establishing and maintaining internal peace. Here’s Robert Benson from his helpful book In Constant Prayer: “Time is the real currency of our age, and we have to manage our time in relation to our spiritual life as much as we do in relation to any other part of our lives.”

Time doesn’t create itself. It is scarce and like any scarce commodity has to be cordoned off, fenced in, and protected—or it will be stolen at gunpoint. Use a pipe, use a prayer book, whatever works for you. Find a practice to intrude in the coercive urgency of life. And do it now. Says Ortega y Gasset, “We cannot put off living until we are ready.” We never will be. The world never will be. Tell it to wait while you do the same.