David Lisbona, Wikimedia Commons.

“There’s a need to reduce stress in the workplace and meditation is the best technique I know,” says Richard Geller of MedWorks, a company that runs several different corporate meditation programs. “You can do it any time, any place and anywhere — even for a second. It’s also very cheap: the return on investment is phenomenal.” Many companies apparently recognize the value; everyone from Reebok to Google to Twitter supports meditation in the workplace. The stress itself, according to Geller, stems from the way in which the modern world overworks our fight-or-flight response. What was once reserved for harrowing moments and life-or-death situations is now a constant.

That fight-or-flight reference reminded me of José Ortega y Gasset’s famous statement: “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.”

Pow.

Meditation as an antidote makes sense. So does prayer. The Psalmist talks about being in constant prayer: “Evening and morning and at noon I utter my complaint and moan, and [God] hears my voice” (Psalm 55.17). Then there’s Daniel. Daniel, exiled in Babylon, became a ruler over several dozen regional governors, and excelled in his performance because, as it says, “an excellent spirit was in him” (Daniel 6.3). It also says that Daniel “got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God” (6.10). One complains, the other thanks. Both take themselves out of hubbub of the day and put themselves into the presence of God.

I’m no David or Daniel, but praying the hours is central to my spirituality — and my sanity. I carry a prayer book with me wherever I go. I have (yes, I’m admitting this in public) a “man bag” in which I keep a couple of slim volumes, including my prayer book. It’s with me almost everywhere, especially the office. I find that starting the day with prayer and going back to my prayer book during the day buoys me against the floodwaters. It helps me keep perspective. It helps me detach from the crises. Most of all, it helps remind me of the God by whose providence the whole melee is governed and directed for my good and my salvation. Here’s one particular gem that I typically pray several times a day:

O Lord, grant me to greet the coming day in peace. Help me in all things to rely upon Your holy will. In every hour of the day reveal Your will to me. Bless my dealings with all who surround me. Teach me to treat all that comes to me throughout the day with peace of soul, and with the firm conviction that Your will governs all. In all my deeds and words guide my thoughts and feelings. In unforseen events let me not forget that all are sent by You. Teach me to act firmly and wisely, without embittering or embarrassing others. Give me strength to bear the fatigue of this coming day with all that it will bring. Direct my will, teach me to pray, pray You Yourself in me. Amen.

The day may be crazy, but God is good. What more do you need to worry about?

Detail from Hans Memling's 'Young Man at Prayer,' Wikimedia Commons.

Another philosopher and artist, Wyndham Lewis, saw the problem this way: “Everything in our life today conspires to thrust most people into . . . a sort of trance of action,” he said in the 1957 preface to his book Time and Western Man. “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.”

For Ortega y Gasset or Lewis, we’ve lost the time to think and contemplate and find inner calm, and I suspect it’s truer now than when they wrote. Schedules, regimens, agendas, infoclutter, datagluts, distractions — there’s more to keep up with now than at any other time in history. I can start my day one moment and then pause to find it’s already three in the afternoon. Sometimes I hardly know where the day has gone. I’m trapped in that trance of action, devoid of reflection, all busyness and no calm.

But I think my suspicion is probably bunk. It’s always been this way.

“[O]ne of the gravest perils which besets the ministry,” said Scottish minister Andrew Bonar, “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 was concerned with church life, but the overlap with Ortega y Gasset and Lewis is pretty clear. And, interestingly, Bonar died in 1892, long before our modern woes. You can go back even further and find the fourth- and fifth-century Christian monastic writers wrestling with aspects of the same problem.

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

We can filter those stimuli; we do it reflexively all the time. The trick is being mindful 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? What if we could step outside the “prescribed tracks” and snap out of the “trance of action” to collect our minds, gather the loose threads of thought, and regain focus is crucial? We need to if we have any hope of establishing and maintaining internal peace.

“Time is the real currency of our age,” as Robert Benson says in his helpful book In Constant Prayer, “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.