Pursuing The Quieter Life – Inner Quiet. Outer Quiet. Quiet Philosophy_Education & Science

Pursuing The Quieter LifeInner Quiet. Outer Quiet. Quiet PhilosophyAboutConsultingContactPatronsPublished ElsewhereResourcesSupportAboutConsultingContactPatronsPublished ElsewhereResourcesSupportHiatusBy DeanOn January 24, 2019In UncategorizedSome very difficult circumstances have forced me to put this blog on temporary hiatus. You can, however, still get content from me by subscribing to my email list here.The Quieter Life Is Not About Avoiding RealityBy DeanOn November 6, 2018In Quiet Philosophy, The Quieter LifePhoto via PeterSomeone on Twitter recently used the phrase “head in the sand” in response to something I posted, accusing me of avoiding reality. This comment reflects the common misconception that the Quieter Life is a kind of retirement, a withdrawal from real life. Many people believe the pursuit of The Quieter Life means walling oneself off from the world to live out one’s days in some unperturbed isolation.This is wrong, but it’s easy to see why people believe it. We have all been taught that the good life is stuffed full of activity and amusements. We have come of age in a society which constantly emphasizes more. The goal of our education is to maximize our consumer power. Suggesting that consumption alone is a weak purpose for human life seems counterintuitive.Counterintuitive as it may be, the fact is that our consumer lifestyles do not guarantee a full life, a rich life or a deep one. In fact, the default consumer lifestyle, far from pushing us deeper into the core of reality, keeps us skimming along its surface. People don’t see this because busyness is hypnotic and distractions abound. It’s easiest to see this truth when we think about popular culture. Here’s an example off the top of my head: awards shows. Every year, people sit down and watch awards shows ranging from minor ones that appear on obscure cable channels all the way up to the Oscars. The next morning, these same people watch these shows recapped on the morning network chat shows and talk about them at work. Is it really the case that the time devoted to these shows, to both viewing and discussing them adds to our lives? What would we lose if we cut them out of our lives entirely? Almost nothing, and yet, many people feel that failing to keep up with celebrities through award shows, podcasts or checking TMZ every day keeps them involved in the world in a way that the pursuit of The Quieter Life would not.Upon even a moment’s reflection, we can see this is not true. Critics of The Quieter Life may argue that designing one’s life around avoiding things is unhealthy. That’s fine, because The Quieter Life is not about avoiding things. The Quieter Life is about finding a way into the deepest realities of life. It is the default consumerist lifestyle that, for all its emphasis on accomplishment and acquisition, is actually about avoiding the deepest things in life. This is one reason such a lifestyle is so popular.The Quieter Life is the opposite of this. Rather than encouraging withdrawal from the world, its focus is on making room to engage those things that truly nourish the inner life, those things too often shunted to the side by our modern lifestyle. Certainly the pursuit of The Quieter Life involves some level of withdrawal. For example, we might decide to stop watching the news. We might stop engaging in activities that involve the pointless frittering away of money. We might decide to spend more time at home.But, these measures of withdrawal are only in service of a larger goal which is the true engagement of reality. This type of withdrawal serves to make space for the things that matter most. In the context of The Quieter Life, withdrawal is simply a tool for setting and defending the boundaries that allow our lives to belong to us, to be lived in accordance with our priorities and values rather than simply being colonized by the forces that would make our lives anything but quiet.People in our time have ceased to be able to tell the difference between a frenetic life, especially one full of amusements and frivolity, and a truly happy life. The role of withdrawal is to help reestablish this distinction. Only by creating space between one’s mind and the culture can a person begin to distinguish between those few things that make life deep and serious and fulfilling and all the junk the surrounding culture funnels toward us.A certain kind of withdrawal and, yes, avoidance is necessary for growth. When he finds himself in a poisonous atmosphere, the wise man leaves. Our culture is a poisonous atmosphere, and wisdom dictates creating a certain amount of distance from it in order to thrive. This is not putting one’s head in the sand. Those pursuing The Quieter Life know exactly what’s going on around them. They also know that in an age of disposable everything, pursuing what lasts requires turning one’s back on what doesn’t.______________________________________________________If you have benefited from this post, please consider sharing it on social media using the buttons below. If you’d like to help with the work I am doing, you can do so by visiting my Patreon page or this blog’s Support page.Death Visits Our HomeBy DeanOn October 20, 2018In Inner Quiet, Outer Quiet, Quiet PhilosophyImage Via PixabayAbout a year and a half ago, our oldest started to want a pet of her own. She saved up her money, and one day I came home to find two gerbils had become additions to our household. They were cute and scruffy and my daughter was obviously attached to them. They are both dead now. The first one went a few months after his arrival when our cat (hereafter referred to as “Murder Cat”) knocked their cages from the top of the dresser where they sat. Both gerbils fled the crash. One hid successfully. The other fell victim to the devilish impulses of Murder Cat.The survivor lived a happy life, burrowing in his bedding, accepting little bits of apple through his bars, frantically exploring the bedroom in his little plastic ball. Things changed last Sunday when it was time for his weekly cage cleaning.When my wife lifted him out, she discovered some kind of growth on his belly. A few moments of googling indicated this was likely a scent gland tumor. Things weren’t looking good. Turns out, these growths are often lethal in gerbils and treatment options are limited.On Monday, wife and daughter took him to be checked out by the vet. The doctor couldn’t say for sure. She thought there was a slight chance it was just swelling due to an infected scratch. She sent him home with a bottle of antibiotics and a warning that if the growth began to bleed that it would be time to put him down.At home, he licked up his apple-flavored medicine with relish, and I hoped he would be okay. The next morning, when my wife finished giving him his second dose, her hand was covered with blood.The vet wasn’t free until almost 4. The late appointment meant death hovered over us most of the day. At the office, we waited in an exam room. Our oldest was tearful, and everyone in the office was very kind to her. The assistant had us sign some paperwork and explained the procedure. They would anesthetize the little guy and then give him an injection to stop his heart. We had to wait again for the vet to be free. This was the hardest part. Our daughter slammed herself against me and I squeezed her tight. At that moment, she needed a father, a firm presence against whom she could collapse, a masculine strength to help her bear the mystery of loss and death. That moment was the essence of fatherhood distilled. The vet gave us the choice of following her pet right to the end or just saying goodbye in the examining room. Our daughter was brave, and said she wanted to stick with her little friend til the end. I went with her.The staff led us back to a small room with a large window that looked into a surgical theater. On the other side of the window, the vet place the gerbil in a transparent plastic box. She flipped a switch on a nearby machine, and we knew the anesthetic gas was filling the space around him. Eventually, we could see him stumble, and finally flop down, motionless.The vet turned her back away from the window as she administered the lethal injection. A few moments later she brought the gerbil back to us wrapped in a towel. My daughter had sobbed the whole time and was still crying. “You did what was best for him,” the vet said to her. “He knew you loved him.”We brought him home in a small cardboard box on which someone had written Hershey, the gerbil’s name, in girlish script and decorated with hand drawn hearts. Later, we buried him near his old companion out behind the garage in a grave I marked with a paver left over from when I built the patio last summer.What does all this have to do with The Quieter Life? Just this: the noise of our lives tends to obscure the depth and significance of our moments. We allow ourselves to be distracted from the real meaning of events and from the impact of our choices. We live as if we aren’t always moving toward the next good-bye.Yet, in moments like these, when death and loss become very real, we see how important it is to make and hold space in our lives for one another. Any real loss, even of a tiny, but beloved pet, puts things into perspective. In the face of death, the details on which we normally focus seem trivial. We see how much time and energy we waste. We despise our pettiness and resolve to do better, and we do until we are once again distracted.The Quieter Life is one in which this higher perspective is intentionally cultivated rather than forced on us by sudden loss. The point of pursuing The Quieter Life is, after all, to open space for the deepest and richest bits of life to surface. If we can do this, we can, at least to some small degree, redeem the pain of loss and death by turning them into a door opening onto a quieter, meaningful sort of life. Conflict Is Part of The Quieter LifeBy DeanOn October 16, 2018In Inner QuietImage Via PixabayThe Quieter Life is not a life free from conflict. Instead, it is a life of deep congruity, of deep integrity. Any attempt to live such a life will entail its fair share of conflict, between individuals, between individuals and institutions, and even conflict between the individual and the wider society.How can a life that accepts conflict as normal be a quieter life? Because living the Quieter Life means building a life that reflects your deepest values, a life you can be at peace with. Given that others will not always share your values and perspectives, conflict will arise. The first dimension of The Quieter Life, however, is the internal one, and remaining true to your convictions even in light of conflict, your sense of your own integrity will grow and your heart will quiet. Most people never know this kind of peace because most people avoid the conflict which is always its precursor. Avoiding conflict is not an altogether bad policy. Much of the conflict in the world is unnecessary and arises from human beings’ attachments to positions and opinions that are trivial, irrational or absurd. Not all conflict is like this. Some involves our deepest values and beliefs. Some arises when people expect us to accept from them a standard of treatment we ought not. In these cases, we should accept that to live The Quieter Life will require negotiating such conflicts as well as possible. Determining between necessary and unnecessary conflict is a skill well worth developing. To do this requires becoming aware of when you are pointlessly invested in a particular outcome. These kinds of conflicts flare up constantly, and many people are drawn into them. I know some people who once found themselves embroiled in a conflict with a neighbor because, after doing some research, they discovered the neighbors’ fence was 8 or 10 inches over the property line. The loss of those few inches in no way impaired their lives. No building projects were stalled. The children were not robbed of space to play. No, it was simply that whoever put the fence there had made a mistake that went undetected for years. And the family on whose property the fence was sitting decided to create a conflict about it.In this case, we see the sort of emotional investment in petty issues that virtually guarantees something other than the Quieter Life. Don’t make these mistakes. Learn to let these little things go. Unless there is a valid reason conflict is necessary, steer clear of it. When such a reason is present, however, avoiding conflict will only result in a heightened sense of anxiety, of self-doubt. Avoiding necessary conflict will never strengthen the sense of self-efficacy on which a quieter inner life depends. Instead, shrinking back from necessary conflict will erode the foundation of inner quiet you are seeking to cultivate. When a serious principle is at stake, or when your dignity is under assault, refusing to engage in a conflict will cause you not to trust yourself. In such cases, avoiding conflict is simply refusing to protect yourself. When you choose to avoid necessary conflict, you will always wonder unconsciously how, when you have already demonstrated an unwillingness to protect yourself, can you trust yourself in the future. Anxiety is often just another word for this lack of self-trust. To pursue The Quieter Life, we must sometimes make choices that others will not like. When we clarify what we must do in order to feel at peace within ourselves, some people will try to prevent us from pursuing these things. Some will criticize and project onto us their own fears and fantasies. This is one reason boundaries are so important.The reward for bearing the unpleasantness of conflict is a deeper inner quiet. When we listen to our inner voice, when we take a stand and accept difficulty for the sake of our principles, our inner world becomes more stable. It is as if by enduring necessary conflict in the outer, physical world, the inner, spiritual one becomes firmer, more real, unshakeable. The result is an increased ability to handle relational conflict, at whatever level it comes, with a deeper sense of inner calm. We find we are less anxious, more resilient and more able to articulate what we stand for, what we desire. And this inner strength, in turn, improves our ability to navigate conflicts even when the stakes are high, and ultimately helps us to become agents of peace and quiet in this noisy and fractious world.Five Things You Can Do to Get a Quieter Life Right NowBy DeanOn October 6, 2018In Inner Quiet, Outer QuietImage via PixabayOverload, the feeling that too much is coming at you, may be the quintessential emotional experience of modern life. We all feel it from time to time; most of us feel it pretty much all the time. We respond with increased levels of stress which come forth as all sorts of problems: depression, anxiety, out of control anger and a general sense of dissatisfaction. Such a situation requires analysis. But, analysis is useful in so far as it helps us to see as abnormal what we have taken all our lives to be the normal course of things. That we take the extreme pressures of modern life as normal is, after all, the most abnormal thing about our age. At the same time, analysis must be accompanied by action. Since I tend to veer toward the cerebral side, I want to balance my penchant for analysis by making concrete suggestions for action. In pursuit of that goal, I offer here are five things we all can do immediately to quiet our lives.Get Used to The QuietThe quiet scares most modern people. We have become so used to noise surrounding us constantly that when there is little of it, we panic. Think about it. Every shop you enter plays music. When you hop out to pump your gas, in addition to the noise of the street, you often have that little TV screen in the pump that spits ads at you. Almost never are we in the car without music or a podcast. A majority of us can’t even tolerate quiet when we are exhausted and keep the television playing as we attempt to sleep. Pursuing The Quieter Life means that we must learn to tolerate and then to embrace actual quiet. We must push through our fear of it and learn to enjoy the solace and beauty it offers.Go On A News FastI decided to try this myself as an experiment a while ago. I have found that it is impossible not to know about real developments. If a hurricane is landing somewhere, if a bridge collapses, I’ll hear about. Given the way media saturates our culture it is virtually impossible to miss an important headline. Most of our news culture is not really made up of news however, but of opinion. Most “news” outlets are just venues for people to engage in endless debate making the same points repeatedly. People stay hooked into this show not because they are learning anything new, but because the ceaseless outrage keeps them excited. It is a kind of physical addiction that pursuing The Quieter Life requires kicking.Clarify Your ObjectivesIf you don’t know where you are headed or what your goals are, your life will be noisier than necessary as you flail around moving from pointless activity to pointless activity. When your objectives are clear, they become a filter by which you can decide what belongs in your life and what does not. This eliminates a lot of noise. By having such a filter, you do not have to decide a million times a day what belongs in your life and what does not. By clarifying your objectives, you make those decisions only once. What contributes to the achievement of your objectives stays, what doesn’t has to go.Turn off the MediaThis one is related to the idea of a news fast, but takes the idea one step further. Instead of merely avoiding the news, make a concerted effort to spend more time away from the media, at least the electronic media. Too many people long for The Quieter Life, but never think they could take a step closer to it just by turning off the television, flipping the laptop shut or pulling the earbuds out of their heads. We have innumerable entertainment options. We could all easily spend our lives watching, listening to or playing along with one of them. Some people confuse such an existence with The Quieter Life, but The Quieter Life is not one of indolent entertainment, but one in which the deepest levels of meaning are cultivated. Spending too much time immersed in electronic media makes finding these levels of deep meaning nearly impossible.Do Less A Quieter Life is one where commitments and activities are carefully scrutinized. Each one must add value to the whole. Often, this is not the case. We are busy with activities that seem important in themselves, but that in the context of our whole lives work as a negative force, subtracting rather than adding to our overall sense of peace and wholeness. Obviously, the addiction to activity plays into the modern person’s sense of being overwhelmed. But, there is a flip side. To pursue the Quieter Life requires overcoming our fear of missing out, our fear that if we let our foot of the gas and slow down we will miss the next opportunity, the next big thing. We have all been sold the notion that the good life is one filled to the seams with hobbies, experiences, work. Even a short time living this way makes it clear this is not the path to the good life, and that as we speed through our moments, we too often leave the good life, The Quieter Life, in the dust.Of course, many more actions than these can quiet a life in the long run. But, they say nothing encourages change like immediate results. So, for those of you who need some quiet right now, these five steps are a fast way to start moving toward a slower life.____________________________________________________If you have benefited from this post, please consider sharing it on social media using the buttons below. If you’d like to help with the work I am doing, you can do so by visiting my Patreon page or this blog’s Support page.How the September of Success Helped Quiet My LifeBy DeanOn September 17, 2018In Inner Quiet, Quiet Philosophy, The Quieter LifePhoto via USS RooseveltThis month, I have been busy seeking to quiet my life through tons of physical exertion. I am in the middle of the “September of Success” program organized by Hunter Drew and Craig James through their website, “The Family Alpha.” The program presents the men who participate with daily challenges. Some of these change; some are always the same. Every day, we are challenged to do 100 push-ups, something I had never done before. I signed on early for September of Success, in late July, I think. Somewhere near the beginning of August, I heard there would be a push-up requirement, so I got started.At that point, I could do maybe five. So far today, I have knocked out 75. Through some good advice from Craig, I slowly started building my strength in the month before the program, and so far have not missed a day.The accountability the program provides, especially the constant checking in to see who has done the day’s push-ups, has helped me more than anything. Most of the other challenges are mental or spiritual exercises that have been part of my life for a long time, but for too much of my life, I shied away from physical fitness. I do the push-ups in part because they are a symbol for everything going on in the program. They symbolize the difficulty of doing the work to create a different sort of life, to lead a family, to build strong character. A guy in the program who won’t do his push-ups automatically throws his commitment to all the other challenges into question,What I have seen is that in my mind, lying just beneath the level of consciousness, some negative beliefs have long lurked. One of these has been the idea that developing real physical strength was not possible for me. This false belief is backed by a thousand specious justifications: I am too old, I missed my chance, I don’t have time, I am inherently unathletic, only dumb jocks care about that stuff. So far this month, I have seen more and more clearly the truth of AJA Cortes’ maxim that physicality is mentality. By strengthening and caring for our bodies, we help straighten out and clarify our thinking.I have also seen that taking responsibility for one’s health is a foundational discipline for The Quieter Life. A life plagued by a lack of physical vibrancy will always rest on a shaky foundation. The need to be constantly attending to the consequences of poor health choices can only ever add noise to our lives. The Quieter Life is, after all, a bodily experience.There’s a lesson here that goes beyond simply the need for exercise. At bottom, this month has been a lesson in the necessity of becoming more aware of the things I have believed at a very deep level, a level so deep I could not see those beliefs or their limiting effects.I’m sure I’m not the only one. Developing and holding onto limiting ideas is a universal human experience. What is not universal is the desire and willingness to become aware of and to examine them. Only a few do that. Those few who do have an opportunity to achieve The Quieter Life. So much of the chaos, noise and struggle we experience flows ultimately from the underlying belief system we carry around that tells us how the world works and what we can, but mostly can’t, do.Having unconscious beliefs is not inherently bad, of course. We couldn’t possibly cope with the world if we had to consciously form every belief we hold. Sometimes, unconscious beliefs keep us safe by establishing our comfort zones and keeping us out of danger. We rely on them to help us make quick decisions.The problem arises when we operate on the basis of these beliefs without being willing to examine them when we they present themselves. Without subjecting such beliefs to conscious scrutiny, we become more like machines living out our programming than full human beings. We live in a constricting comfort zone, and whatever else The Quieter Life is, it is the comfort zone we find when other too small comfort zones have been abandoned.So, in addition to larger triceps, I am taking away from this month a renewed commitment to examine my unconscious beliefs. Who knows what I may find. Whatever I find, I am sure that such self-scrutiny is the path to greater peace, self-possession and, ultimately, to The Quieter Life.____________________________________________________If you have benefited from this post, please consider sharing it on social media using the buttons below. If you’d like to help with the work I am doing, you can do so by visiting my Patreon page or this blog’s Support page.Boundaries Are The Heart of Quieter RelationshipsBy DeanOn August 9, 2018In Outer Quiet, The Quieter LifeImage via PixabayThe floor of the room in the basement where our children play too often looks like a bomb has just gone off inside a toy store. Little pieces of plastic lie everywhere. Here’s a My Little Pony tangled up with a LalaLoopsy piled up on a bunch of Legos. Over there, the Octonauts have been abandoned in the middle of some adventure. The animals from Littlest Pet Shop are scattered about.It looked this way yesterday when I called the girls down and gave them some instructions. “Pick these things up,” I said, “and put them all in the bins where they go.” Before long, the room was much cleaner, the floor was visible and the place looked more like a home than a disaster in Santa’s enchanted village.The mess in our basement is a perfect metaphor for other kinds of messes. Lots of things get tangled up in our lives and need to be sorted out. We function better if we can get all our things sorted and put in the proper bins.While this principle applies both to our material possessions and to our inner lives, people seem to experience the most pain when they fail to sort out their relationships, placing the proper duties and responsibilities in the right person’s bin and allowing that individual to take charge of what’s in there.Deciding what goes in whose bin in any relationship is a matter of boundary setting, and boundaries are at the heart of quieter, more peaceful relationships. Poor boundaries are a requirement for tumultuous, difficult relationships. People who consistently defend their own boundaries while consistently respecting those of others simply have less conflict and greater peace.The fact that boundaries are so important for peaceful relationships makes the fact that most people never think about them all that much more astonishing. Most people have no idea how to begin sorting out what belongs in their bin and what belongs in someone else’s. Very often the mess in a relationship is so overwhelming, it is hard to know where to start.Start here. The general principle for sorting out what goes in whose bin is this:Every human being, with very few exceptions, is responsible for his or her own thoughts, feelings, words and actions.Are you angry at someone? That’s in your bin. Is your boyfriend mad that you wouldn’t give in and do something that you felt was dangerous or wrong? That’s in his bin. His problem. Did you fail to pay a bill this month? Your bin. Is your mom still mad at you because you majored in English instead of Accounting? That goes in her bin.The truth, of course, is that human beings resist this process. For many reasons, we often prefer the confusion of our emotional and relational mess to the clarity of good boundaries. If you are the person resisting, it might help you to think about the reality that the more things we accept as rightly belonging in our bin, the more things we have control over. Often when we feel out of control and overwhelmed, it is either because we are not clear on what duties really belong in our bin, or we are not exercising them well.When dealing with someone else who either will not accept what rightfully belongs in his bin or who constantly violates some important boundary of yours, you have choices to make. You can never force someone to take responsibility for his feelings, thoughts, words or actions. Trying to make them do so will waste your time and break your heart. It’s better to protect yourself by looking at what is in your own bin, and deciding what you can live with and what is a deal breaker. Deal breakers should be few.Reducing the role in your life of someone who refuses to own his feelings, thoughts, words or actions, or who consistently violates other important boundaries is not wrong. In fact, doing so can be a great benefit both to you and to the other person. Ultimately, everyone benefits from the tidying up process this sort of boundary setting entails, even if it involves some short-term difficulty.Just like some of us might dread cleaning our homes, or asking our children to get their stuff up off the floor, we often dread setting the boundaries with others that create peace between us. But, like cleaning up our literal spaces, when we make a habit of keeping our emotional spaces tidy, we come to see, in the end, how liberating it is to live within the confines of a strong set of boundaries.The best book I know of on this topic is here. The authors are evangelical Christians, and some of that may show through. In general, though, the book is written for a wide audience and has been a benefit to millions.______________________________________________________If you have benefited from this post, please consider sharing it on social media using the buttons below. If you’d like to help with the work I am doing, you can do so by visiting my Patreon page or this blog’s Support page.To Pursue The Quieter Life, Break the Spell Of BusynessBy DeanOn July 30, 2018In Inner Quiet, The Quieter LifeImage Via PixabayI am frequently the first one up at our house. On summer mornings, I go stumbling downstairs, attend to the pets and open the house to let the cool, fresh air flow in. Almost always, I step out onto the back porch to soak in the quiet of the neighborhood. Though we live in an area where we are surrounded by others, I am often impressed by how quiet our street is, and never more so than in the morning. A distant dog may bark, or some rambunctious sparrows squabble over seed at the feeder, but things are generally silent.Eventually, I hear the sounds of movement upstairs that mean my wife will be down. A little while later we hear the clomping of little feet that signals the waking of children and the quiet begins to dissipate. Their arrival downstairs is followed by the chattering, giggling, whining and, often, crying that characterize people their age.From that point forward, the day is off in earnest racing toward its conclusion. One event leads to the next until we collapse an hour before bed to talk and sometimes watch television or whatever. We can easily arrive at the end of our days and hardly have been conscious of their passing.The workaday world is mesmerizing. The demands its places on us and the subsequent level of necessary activity hypnotize us, narrowing our focus until all that exists is the next item we are striving to check off our list. We spend these overly-full days in a trance, and wake up near the end only to wonder what happened.Considering that being in this trance doesn’t feel good, it might be surprising that more people don’t try to break it. But, the thing about hypnotized people is that they don’t know they’re hypnotized. The only way to know is to be conscious of what it feels like to be in your right mind, and then to be conscious of what it feels like to be hypnotized.My early morning quiet is important for this reason. In that short, silent span I know I am in my own mind. I can sense that my awareness is broad and open. My body is relaxed and moves more fluidly. My spirit dwells in gratitude. Sometimes, I am able to recall these moments later in the day, and the contrast helps me to break the trance.The Quieter Life means intentionally breaking the trance daily. The importance of taking a few moments several times a day to seek quiet, even if it is only internal, cannot be overstated. Simply taking a mental step back from the activity at hand, and placing it in some larger perspective can reduce the stress we feel and increase our awareness. With lowered stress and increased awareness, we can respond to the demands of the day with something other than the automatic pilot behaviors we default to while in the trance. If necessary, I recommend using a timer to remind you to stop and break the workday trance.Naturally, the goal of the quieter life is to escape the trance altogether. We desire to live consciously in a way that allows our inner quiet to proceed undisturbed. Only a few of us achieve this, but all of us could get closer. Through breaking the trance daily, we hope to tip the scales toward broader awareness and calm. If circumstances in our outer lives need to change, and they likely do, then this broader awareness will help us to more easily see the way. Jump to trying to change those too quickly, and you risk reinforcing the pattern of stressful striving you are seeking to escape. All positive external change is a mirror of what is happening inside.To an outsider, the time when I am the only one awake in the house might seem like time spent doing nothing much. And, that would be a reasonable conclusion for the outside observer to come to because the important things happening during those times are not happening on the outside. They are happening inside, preparing me to go through my day with a foundation of quiet that I can return to when I find myself sucked into the trance that busyness inevitably induces. We all need to recall times like these when we step back from our work in the middle of the rushing world. These are the times we return to seeking peace and strength so that, within us at least, it might be morning all day long.Pieces Of The Quieter LifeBy DeanOn July 23, 2018In Quiet ReflectionsImage Via PixabayA life is a big thing to clean up. It’s easy to get confused about what goes where. When I was younger, I struggled with this. I suffered from terrible anxiety my first two or three years of college. At times, it was so intense I would become physically ill, sometimes vomiting from the free-floating fear that plagued me. My mind was a jumble of bizarre and mundane worries: “were my friends all from some other planet and not telling me” would be entwined with “how am I going to get this paper done by the due date”. My external environment reflected my internal struggle. My car and home were a mess. In my mind, not putting things away, allowing papers to cover the floor, and never throwing away fast food wrappers all seemed to be an expression of freedom. I was, without knowing it, desperate for order.Part of changing was learning to reduce complex subjects to their component parts. The pursuit of The Quieter Life is one of these complex topics best approached by breaking out its components. After all, The Quieter Life is always the result of cultivating peace and order in the various areas that together create our experience of the world.This is the last in a series of posts laying out the basics of my thinking on the topic. I began with a personal post explaining how I came to start writing about this topic. Then, I moved on to talk about why the hunger for The Quieter Life is universal. I then reflected on the fact that The Quieter Life is a bodily phenomenon. Last week, I wrote about some of the characteristics that define The Quieter Life. Now, it’s time to examine the components of The Quieter Life.The easiest way to break down what constitutes The Quieter Life is simply to divide the notion into The Quieter Inner Life and The Quieter Outer Life. Obviously, these categories correspond to the basic categories within our experience. We all experience the world from inside our minds and bodies. Yet, what happens inside our minds and bodies is intimately connected to what happens in the outer world. Most of us long for peace in both these arenas. That makes sense because, since they are so tightly related, we know peace in one won’t last long without peace in the other.What does The Quieter Inner Life consists of? Chiefly, it consists of the proper mindset. A mind that sees reality for what it is, recognizes and submits to Truth and engages the world productively will be at peace. A mind full of doubt, confusion, and rebellion will be in turmoil. It will not be able to grasp reality rightly. It will, in short, be the kind of mind that thinks never washing dishes is freedom.The inner dimension of The Quieter Life also requires the adoption of right attitudes. Humility and an inclination to forgive both quiet the inner life tremendously. Clarifying your attitudes and values is among the most productive activities you can undertake with regards to achieving a quieter inner life.The outer dimension of The Quieter Life consists mostly of managing relationships, work and environment. So much of the disquiet we experience in the outer dimension stems from unhappiness with one of these. And, though most people recognize how much these factors affect them, most don’t know how to create quieter circumstances for themselves by managing them in a positive way. I certainly didn’t know how to do this back in those terrible college years. Going forward, this blog will contain content about pursuing The Quieter Life in both the inner and outer dimensions. Additionally, some posts will offer thoughts that have implications for both arenas. These posts will be tagged Quiet Reflections. Thus, will I be practicing what I preach. By breaking the pursuit of The Quieter Life into its component pieces, I hope to make it easier for us both to quiet our lives, minds and hearts.Getting to where I am today from who I was all those years ago when my anxiety was overwhelming and my apartment unpleasant has not been easy. I’m not entirely there yet. Many struggles remain but, just like you, I am working in both the inner and outer realms to create a quieter existence, something I would not be able to do without the clarity that comes from breaking complex topics into pieces. My hope, and perhaps yours, is that when all the pieces come together, peace will be the outcome.What Defines The Quieter LifeBy DeanOn July 17, 2018In The Quieter LifeImage Via PixabayOne way to guarantee you will never find what you are looking for is to have no have clear idea what you are seeking. Imagine stopping by the supermarket for something as common as butter. Imagine too that you had only heard about this butter thing and had no first hand experience with it. You might spend hours wandering the store and get nowhere. Worse, imagine someone asked you to stop by the auto parts store and pick up a new brake caliper. Without knowing what you were looking for, you could easily come back with a pair of windshield wipers and one of those hula girl air fresheners.So it is with the pursuit of The Quieter Life.Without a clear idea of what constitutes The Quieter Life, we can be sure we’ll never find it.Many people have only vague sense of The Quieter Life. Mostly, we know what we don’t want. We don’t want a long commute. We don’t want so many obligations that we can not rest. We don’t want meaningless work. We don’t want constant turmoil in our relationships. We know The Quieter Life must be whatever is the opposite of these.That’s a skimpy definition. The more concrete we can make our understanding of The Quieter Life, the more likely we are to realize it. The clearer the picture in the mind, the greater the chances reality will come to reflect it. Conceptions of The Quieter Life will vary from person to person. People have different preferences, different tastes, and so the details of any particular instantiation of The Quieter Life will vary accordingly.That said, here are five qualities that must be common to any vision of The Quieter Life. There are certainly more, but these are among the most important.1. Inner Peace. More than anything, The Quieter Life is characterized by a reduction of all the internal noise we routinely suffer. It means hushing all the unnecessary concerns with which we trouble and, frankly, amuse ourselves. It means admitting to ourselves who we are, and finding a means to make peace with that.If our lifestyle does not allow us to face the problems of living with greater emotional groundedness and resolve, it’s not The Quieter Life, but an impostor or substitute. Increased inner peace is the first condition of The Quieter Life because the attitudes that create it flow outward to shape the rest of the world. If the heart isn’t quiet, nothing else can be.2. Peaceful Relationships. One byproduct of living from a quieter heart is that our relational worlds become more peaceful. This doesn’t mean that things are perfect. We cannot control others, and accepting this reality is itself a major step toward a quieter, more peaceful internal world.Because we cannot control others, our relationships will always be subject to trouble. But, with the greater confidence that a quieter inner life brings, we can set boundaries and defend them. We can eliminate toxic people and environments from our lives. The quieter life means no longer subjecting ourselves to people who prefer lives of damaging strife to lives of simplicity and depth. There is much more to say on this topic, and I expect this to be a major area of focus on this blog going forward.3. Stability. Change, even when it is good, produces stress. This is even more true when the change is negative. Every version of The Quieter Life must, therefore, prioritize stability, must value continuity and routine.This sounds dull to modern ears because we have all been conditioned, through countless rah-rah high school pep talks and Mt. Dew commercials, to believe that the good life is the life of constant change, constant excitement, constant challenge. That only works out well on television. In reality, people who pursue such lives end up damaged, broke and exhausted, pretty much like the average person today.4. Unhurriedness. The quieter life is the slower life. This means we pare down our commitments and activities to the essential. When we focus on those few things that actually return a long-term emotional and spiritual payoff, other things fall away. Let them.Though their falling away may at first be experienced as a loss, the space their absence creates can be filled by blissful, refreshing nothing. The quieter life is a life with a sufficient supply of nothing: nothing on the calendar, nothing urgent, nothing preventing us from attending to what really matters. To have enough nothing these days is really something. Most people now are on the brink of destruction for want of it. Cherish what nothing you have.5. Intentionality. None of this happens by accident. The Quieter Life is not the default mode of human existence. Likely, it never has been. The Quieter Life is the result of intention carefully focused and acted upon. The Quieter Life is, of course, a life lived in concert with one’s deepest desires and values, and this doesn’t just happen. This doesn’t just happen, especially in a culture addicted to hurry, achievement and outward successes. To follow the cultural script now is to move progressively further from The Quieter Life. The Quieter Life comes about only as the result of tenacious, intentional commitment to the values and practices that produce it.Capturing the whole of The Quieter Life in a single post or in five small points is impossible. But, it’s essence can be described in just a few concepts. Certainly these five are among them. Each of these deserves more exploration. That will come in time. That’s okay, because whatever else The Quieter Life is about, it is also about taking pleasure in the slow revelation of the truth.____________________________________________________If you have benefitted from this post, please consider sharing it on Facebook and Twitter using the buttons below. 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