A few years ago, I went on a vision quest in Death Valley—a rite-of-passage designed to help participants step beyond the status quo and see their lives from a larger perspective, and cry for a vision as the Lakota medicine man Black Elk put it. A dozen of us spent 12 days in Death Valley, four of which involved a solo fast.

Before I set off on that solo journey, one of the facilitators suggested an assignment that might address something I had spoken about at length: a feeling of restlessness at the core of my life, and a desire to get my breath back down into my belly rather than high up and shallow in my chest.

She said, “Build a circle of stones and sit inside it for a whole day, and see what happens.”

On the morning of my first solo day, I built a circle of stones a quarter of a mile in diameter. I’m exaggerating, but not by much. The assignment was unnerving, precisely because it drew a tight circle around my attachment to moving and shaking, being busy and productive. And for someone habituated to feeling power in action and oratory, and who felt like I was wasting valuable vision-quest time doing nothing, it was a bit too close to the void, to the cessation of all our doing that’s known as death.

But over that day, I experienced the familiar and fibrillating restlessness inside me shift from drive to neutral, from pacing around like something caged to sitting quietly and watchfully in the center of that circle, submitting myself to the fine and fearsome art of being here now, and noticing that boredom is quite interesting up-close.

I began to realize that, for me, doing nothing is doing something very important: slowing the show down, calming my nervous........

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