PAGE 3
Some people, if they can afford it, try to acquire a place in the country or a second home; I've always thought it easier to make a second house in the week — especially if, like most of us, you lack the funds for expensive real estate. These days, in the age of movement and connection, space, as Marx had it in another context, has been annihilated by time; we feel as though we can make contact with almost anywhere at any moment. But as fast as geography is coming under our control, the clock is exerting more and more tyranny over us. And the more we can contact others, the more, it sometimes seems, we lose contact with ourselves. When I left New York City for the backstreets of Japan, I figured I'd be growing poorer in terms of money, amusements, social life, and obvious prospects, but I'd be richer in what I prize most: days and hours.

This is what the principle of the Sabbath enshrines. It is, as Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great Jewish theologian of the last century, had it, "a cathedral in time rather than in space"; the one day a week we take off becomes a vast empty space through which we can wander, without agenda, as through the light-filled passageways of Notre Dame. Of course, for a religious person, it's also very much about community and ritual and refreshing one's relationship with God and ages past. But even for the rest of us, it's like a retreat house that ensures we'll have something bright and purposeful to carry back into the other six days.

The Sabbath recalls to us that, in the end, all our journeys have to bring us home. And we do not have to travel far to get away from our less considered habits. The places that move us most deeply are often the ones we recognize like long-lost friends; we come to them with a piercing sense of familiarity, as if returning to some source we already know. "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church — " Emily Dickinson wrote. "I keep it, staying at Home."

2014 by Pico Iyer. Excerpt from The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere by Pico Iyer (Simon & Schuster & TED).

Listen to Pico read a section from The Art of Stillness.