Sit quietly

French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal believed humans should learn to be quiet more often...

 “All the unhappiness of men arises from one simple fact: that they cannot sit quietly in their chamber.”

Written in the 1600's many would later define this sentence to mean that we are avoiding stillness and solitude because we fear the truth. 

We might interpret further that Pascal is saying that without entertainment and distraction diverting us, we would be forced to be alone with the truth of our existence.

There is an ineluctable tension between our aspirations and our anticipations and the reality of our lives. 
Pascal unmasks diversion as an attempt to escape reality, and an indication of something unstable and exceedingly out-of-kilter in the human condition. (Douglas Groothuis)

Despite [his] afflictions man wants to be happy, only wants to be happy, and cannot help wanting to be happy. But how shall he go about it? The best thing would be to make himself immortal, but as he cannot do that, he has decided to stop thinking about it. - Pascal

It is, for Pascal, revelatory of a moral and spiritual malaise begging for an adequate explanation. Our condition is “inconstancy, boredom, anxiety.” We humans face an incorrigible mortality that drives us to distractions designed to overcome our worries. Pascal notes that “if man were [naturally] happy, the less he were diverted the happier he would be, like the saints and God.” (Douglas Groothuis)

Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought. Now the order of thought is to begin with ourselves, and with our author and our end. Now what does the world think about? Never about that, but about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring, etc., and fighting, becoming king, without thinking what it means to be a king or to be a man. - Pascal

 Worse yet, our own sensoriam may break down as sight dwindles, hearing ebbs, olfactory awareness fades, and all manner of bodily pleasures become harder to find and easier to lose. (Douglas Groothuis)   

"Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come, and the years draw near when you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”- Ecclesiastes 12:1

Maybe it is time to sit quietly just because our roots, as complex as they might be, are dried up.

'Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend'

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen
justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.

Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must

Disappointment all I endeavour end?

    Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,

How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost

Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust

Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,

Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes

Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again

With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes

Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain,

Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.

Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

"O Lord send rain" is our longing and our plea as we sit quietly in our room.