Free Autopilot by Andrew Smart Page A

simply having to take dictation. One of his great translators, the American poet Robert Bly, writes how Rilke would occasionally miss a rhyme when trying to capture a poem because he could not write fast enough.
    From a neuroscience perspective, Rilke was learning to let brain regions like the medial prefrontal cortex report images and associations from brain regions like the hippocampus and neocortex, whose deepest contents do not always enter awareness. In our constant struggle to achieve success or even just keep our jobs, we use the parts of our brain that process immediate external events. This externally focused network toggles off the default mode network and prevents us from accessing what may be going on in the rest of our brains. Yet our brains are perpetually generating and responding to emotions—and all this emotional energy must be dissipated somewhere.
    Rilke also struggled with bouts of depression, possibly because he did not spare himself in his relentless self-examination. He allowed every ugly side of his internal world to surface to his consciousness so that he could scrutinize it. And here we can see the razor thin line between the peak of genius and the abyss of depression and madness: Rilke lived much of his whole adult life very close to that line.
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    â€œThe lazy man does not stand in the way of progress. When he sees progress roaring down upon him he steps nimbly out of the way.”
    â€”Christopher Morley, “On Laziness”
    Rilke’s amazing ability to explore his unconscious and dredge up perhaps long forgotten scenes and emotions from his youth was likely the result of his brain’s default mode network being allowed to be active while he was being idle.
    For many people this can be a horrifying experience. There is probably a lot of stuff in your unconsciousness that you’d much rather leave there. Could it be that these uncomfortable things you are suppressing by scheduling your day to oblivion are knocking on the door to your consciousness for a reason? The common sense notion about “workaholics” is that they find idleness and inactivity to be unbearable because they are escaping emotional pain through constant work.
    When children enter school, and increasingly even before they enter school, parents fill up their lives with a stream of activities: sports, early exposure music classes, Chinese immersion school, summer camps, volunteer soup kitchen duties, dressage lessons, theater coaching, mathletics, and science workshops. There seems to be a pervasive and deep-seated anxiety among a certain class of parents that their children might actually have time to hang around and be children. Parents are forced to work longer and longer hours, sometimes just to keep the same pay. To replace ourselves we force our children to endure an endless barrage of activities that serve as proxy parents. We do this in order to convince ourselves that we still participate in some meaningful way in our children’s lives.
    We can get reports from teachers or coaches on our child’s successes—all without actually ever seeing the child do the activity we signed them up for. After all, we have more important things to do, like work! It should come as no surprise that as “play dates” overtake simply hanging around with friends and actually playing outside, childhood anxiety and depression rates are soaring, in tandem with childhood obesity.
    The current generation of children may be the first ever to have shorter life-expectancy than the previous generation. Whatever mountains of epidemiological and clinical evidence you need to convince yourself that this is real, the underlying cause is quite straightforward: children who do not spend several hours every day outside running around, hanging out with friends, not doing anything in particular, and instead spend every moment of every day doing parent-induced tasks and lessons, seeing friends on a schedule,