True Recreation

This great description from A Thomas Merton Reader,* which speaks to that great exercise of unclenching the fist of the mind:

"It was wonderful, the silence, and peace, and happiness that pervaded this sunny room, where so many men were together without speaking. Far from there being any sense of restraint, of awkwardness, of strain, you felt flooded with a deep sense of ease and quiet and restful well-being. There was absolutely no kind of tension between those who sat together in silence: they were all absorbed in their books or their thoughts or their writing. And their very activities were marked by a kind of restful quality: they were not imprisoned by any fierce concentration, not driven before the face of some storm of hurry and anxiety. Their eyes rested on the page with a quiet, detached attention; or else they looked away from the book, in thought; or they entered into themselves, or wrote something down." (148)

To be so absorbed and effortlessly in the flow -- how beautiful!

* Edited by Thomas P. McDonnell