Building a time oasis
Feb 10, 2025I recently read an inspiring account of a contemplative workshop led by the late Hungarian philosopher and psychologist Georg Kühlewind.
Kühlewind spoke of the need for humanity to cultivate "free attention" through a contemplation practice so that we could lessen the influence of our reactive, habitual selves.
One of Kühlewind's suggestions for developing this contemplative practice was to create a "time oasis," a fifteen-minute period each week where one practices the art of conversation, or deep listening.
Inside a time oasis, we practice listening intently to another and responding only to what we hear—freeing ourselves from our typical conversational reactions, like the sharing of a similar story or inserting our opinion.
What struck me most about Kühlewind's suggestion, besides identifying "listening" as "conversation," is that we can give a time oasis to an interaction with another person.
The idea of assigning an interaction with someone the quality of a "time oasis" flew in the face of how I typically think of contemplation. Usually I think of finding solitude, or establishing a time of day to meditate alone, for example.
But Kühlewind insists that we can make any interaction a time oasis. A living-in-the-world contemplation. Quite a remarkable suggestion.
As with all things in life, there's only one way to find out: try.
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