More stimulation or real connection? My Light Bulb Moment – by Corin Pilling

This is the view from my window this morning.

I sat here as part of a renewed commitment to quieter mornings. The truth is, the last few months have been hard in the early hours.

I wake too soon, doomscroll, try to get back to sleep, and the cycle displaces my attention before the day has even begun. Prayer becomes partial. I leave the house groggy, disconsolate.

Something different

So I’m trying something different this week.

The phone is off and out of reach. Next, twenty minutes of silent meditation and I’m peering through the lounge window like it’s the flap of a tent, to see what the morning looks like. And like a neon sign in Vegas this little light bulb on my balcony seems to be saying ‘duh.’

It was a lightbulb moment which helped me realise something I’ve known all along.

Most of the time, my brain tells me the cure for whatever ails me is stimulation. It tells me to want more entertainment, more information, more insights, more dopamine.

But what I actually need is different to what my brain tells me I want.

What I need is connection.

Genuine connection. To others, to the world around me, and to the mysteries too big to hold, the ones I can only feel when I sit still.

The truth is I need less stimulation, not more.

Silence

I need silence to let go of my preoccupations. I need silence to find God. And with silence comes the capacity to be present to others.

And the more these margins open up, the more I’m finding those connections.

Yesterday, after an early swim, I sat cross-legged by the pond eating breakfast and drinking coffee. There’s something disarming, I think, about a middle-aged man doing that on a lawn, and maybe that’s exactly what leads to more spacious, gentle encounters than a city like ours usually allows.

It comes down to space created by removing stimulation. It’s hard to connect with anything when you’re absorbed in your own world, or glued to a device.

Discipline

We know this. It’s almost a cliché. But it takes real discipline to pull away from the things demanding our attention, the things insisting they’re more worthwhile.

We need to sit quietly in a room alone. As Henri Nouwen wrote:

‘Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.’

A glimpse of the divine

But I’m aware, too, of the privilege in being able to carve this out: that I have the choice to put it in the schedule, that the demands of my day don’t forbid it. If you’re working flat out and then collapsing each night, you’ll long for this kind of gift.

But this morning, kneeling in front of this rain-splashed bulb, with the trees behind it, I got a glimpse of something far more spacious and divine.

Corin Pilling lives in Kings Cross in London and works for the Methodist Church.