Free Autopilot by Andrew Smart

modern school or workplace. We have to wonder how many young potential Isaac Newtons we are stifling just so we can control them in school and at home. How much does the need to have focused and organized children arise from our obsessively organized adult lives? And why do our adult lives need to be obsessively organized?
    We categorize adults who sit in contemplative moods as flakey, spacey, or lazy. But for your brain to do its best work, you need to be idle. If you want to have great ideas or if you just want to get know yourself, you must stop managing your time. At the very least, modern neuroscience is rapidly amassing more and more evidence that the resting state of the brain is vital to its health.

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RILKE AND THE IDLE EXAMINED LIFE
    â€œThe only journey is the one within.”
    â€”Rainer M. Rilke
    Rilke was a sensitive person ill-suited to his times. The years following the turn of the 20th century in Europe saw the brutal birth of the modern industrial economy and the horrors of World War I. This period also saw the increasing obsession on the part of the capitalist class with measuring time and maximizing worker efficiency. And there are the first hints of the nascent time management industry beginning to wrap its tentacles around the culture. Clocks in offices, factories, and homes were becoming widespread for the first time. Human workers began to be thought of as machines in a system designed to produce profit for the owners of the economy. Against this backdrop, the sensitive and introspective Rilke sacrificed romantic love, his family, and material comforts in order to pursue his art.
    Rilke knew that spending time doing nothing was extremely important for his creative process. He aspired to be idle with joy—which to our over-worked and over-scheduled 21st-century ears sounds shocking. Enjoying idleness is anathema to our cultural belief that without unrelenting activity we are somehow not living up to our potential, a belief which we are taught implicitly from infancy.
    Modern neuroscience may show us that in fact the opposite is true—our true potential can only be realized through periods of doing nothing. As Oscar Wilde writes in the Soul of Man Under Socialism : “Humanity amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure—which, and not labor, is the aim of man—or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight.”
    Recent research is revealing that some forms of self-knowledge may only appear to us in idle states. The default mode network activates not only when we are at rest, but also when we turn our attention to ourselves and “ spect intro .” Our mind begins to wander and the contents of our unconsciousness can percolate up into awareness. The default mode network allows us to process information that is related to social relationships, our place in the wider world, fantasies we have about the future, and of course: emotions.
    Rilke spent much of his adult life actually wandering Europe in search of the ideal place—both physically and spiritually—in which to write poetry. He traveled to Russia and met Tolstoy, he spent time in Sweden, Italy, France, and finally ended up in Switzerland. His work was so important to some patrons that these wealthy people often paid for Rilke to live at their villas or castles while he worked—or, rather, did not work.
    In fact, Rilke waited fifteen years between major volumes of poetry—from New Poems published in 1907 to what many consider his life’s crowning achievements: The Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus , both in 1922. He wrote some poetry during those years; however he considered these “occasional” poems. The Elegies took over ten years to complete. Rilke’s great poems came to him suddenly, and he regarded them as gifts from outside himself, perhaps from angels. Rilke described the experience of writing a poem as