Ask almost anyone what they want more of and the answer comes back fast: time. Time off, time away, time without the calendar dictating the shape of the day.
Eight weeks is what stopped me in my tracks. Not years of monastic discipline, just two months of regular practice — and the scans showed a measurable increase in gray-matter concentration in a brain region tied to learning and memory.
Two and a half minutes. That is how long, on average, a person used to stay on a single screen before flicking to something else, back when researchers first started measuring it.
Imagine standing in a fast-moving river. The water doesn't care that you have planted your feet.
The version of me from ten years ago would not have believed how much I now want a quiet, ordinary life.
In the 19th century, a French philosopher called Paul Janet proposed that time appears to accelerate by the proportion of life already lived.
The Greeks had two words for time. Chronos is the clock, minutes ticking evenly past.
I was waiting for a friend at a café the other afternoon — one of those places in Ho Chi Minh city where the stools spill out onto the pavement and the motorbikes go past close enough to feel.
This piece is a personal reflection on attention and habits, not a clinical or psychological assessment.
When I think about my first year in Vietnam, I think about a morning on a small balcony, a cup of black coffee, the heat rising before the city was properly awake.
The afternoon at the second café is where it tends to happen, if it happens at all.
The wallet in my back pocket is darker than it was when I made it. The leather has gone soft at the corners.
Think of the last thing you were certain would change the way you felt about your life.
A few weeks ago I had what should have gone down as a good day. The morning's writing had gone well, I'd eaten lunch in a café I like, and I had a couple of hours of low-stakes errands to run.
There are two ebooks I always meant to write. I never quite started them, or perhaps better put I started and stalled.
We've all experienced it. The understanding arrives late. You only get the map after you have already walked the path, and by then you are somewhere else, walking a new one with no map at all.
