For 2024, how about living a truly quiet life?

Susan Cain astutely points out that it's not about making the right New Years resolution; it's about how you direct your attention.

Where you direct your attention is where you live your life.

As I grow older and hopefully wiser, I find that there is no greater truth. Want a richer, more meaningful, more beautiful, and more peaceful existence this year? Perhaps you don’t have to change who you are, but you can work on changing where you place your attention.

This is the theme of a new post by my dear friend Susan Cain, author of “Quiet” and “Bittersweet” (two books I highly recommend). As Susan writes in her post, it’s “about recognizing that we all have our light sides and our shadow sides, and every day, many times a day, without realizing it, we make a choice of which side of our natures to nourish.”

Also, this Sunday, January 28, I’m going to be the featured guest on Susan’s Sunday Candlelight Chats, a special feature that she runs for her Substack subscribers! The Chat will be on Zoom, at 1 pm ET/10 am PT/6 pm UK. To sign up, you can find her at her incredible Substack “The Quiet Life with Susan Cain”. Once you sign up, Susan will send you a Zoom link the day before the chat.

Oh, there will also be a special guest appearance by none other than my Dad! It will be his 81st birthday on Sunday and he is visiting me from Philadelphia. Please join and wish my Dad a happy birthday!

Without further adieu, I bring you the great Susan Cain.

Speaking of quiet and beauty, you should follow this wonderful artist, Oamul Lu

Do the words “a quiet life” make you breathe a little more slowly, a little more deeply?

Would you like a quiet (or quieter) life, this year, and all the years to come?

A life that’s oriented to the unseen, the unspoken, the eternal, and the beautiful?

I know that I would. I’ve been moving in that direction for a while now - it’s one of the benefits of getting a little older. But it’s a constant process.

For me, this has meant a little (OK, a lot) less public speaking, a little more writing. It means less time scrolling social media and more time reading books. It means chasing tennis balls and talking to trees. (I almost wrote “more time with family, ” but I’ve always prioritized that one.)

But the quest for a quiet life is really about attention, and how to direct it. It’s about intellectual and emotional energy, and where to expend it.

Are you directing your attention to people you love — or to those who aggravate you? Are you starting your day reading stressful news or emails, or — as the 12th century poet, Jalal al’Din Rumi asks you here — with music and beauty?

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

(from The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, 1995.)

If you tend to start your mornings flooded by stressful thoughts, you could try printing out these lines, and keeping them near you. You could try finding your way of kissing the ground.

I have a lot of trouble with this one, myself. I often wake up feeling that there might be some disaster in my inbox that I need to attend to RIGHT AWAY, so the first thing I do is scroll my emails. From there, it’s a hop, skip and jump to social media.

I’m not one for New Years resolutions — I think we get farther focusing on joy, rather than willpower. I started exercising only when I found activities I adored (tennis, yoga); I started eating copious amounts of vegetables only when I found dishes I loved. And I started writing only when I took to working in sunny cafe windows.

So instead of a resolution, this year I’d like to suggest that we simply ask ourselves whether we’re directing our attention properly: are you letting the beauty you love be what you do?

In case you feel guilty prioritizing a quiet life in times of strife (of which Rumi himself had experienced plenty), this is not about hiding our heads in the sand.

It’s rather about recognizing that we all have our light sides and our shadow sides, and every day, many times a day, without realizing it, we make a choice of which side of our natures to nourish. And where we choose to direct our thoughts has the power to change our emotions and actions.

We know this from neuroscience, which has a fancy name for this phenomenon: “experience-dependent neuroplasticity.” That is – our daily experiences literally have the power to rewire our brains, and thus our behavior, and thus our lives, and thus our societies.

But we’ve also known this for centuries. “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind,” said Marcus Aurelius. “Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.”

What color is your soul now?

What color do you want it to be?

I wish you a sweet sweet new year,

and am always very grateful that you’re here,

❤️Susan