“The first step in asceticism the desert will teach you is purification from haste, agitation, impatience, pressure. In the desert you have to get rid of the ‘master of the situation’ complex. You find that you are little, insignificant, squeezed in on a waiting bench. No one takes any notice of your needs. Your name has no influence with people. Your urgent engagements become negligible. And the world goes on without your breathless rushing about.
You get things done not by thumping and kicking but by displaying a quality which is highly respected in the desert: the ability to wait. In the desert you enter another level of time where the hands of the clock are replaced by patience and imperturbability. Your organism has to adapt itself not merely to a different time scale, but to a different rhythm and to a different scale of values. And unless you adapt yourself you run the risk of a nervous breakdown. If, on the other hand, you succeed in entering this new dimension of time, you will experience an unexpected calm, a hitherto unknown sense of freedom, and a surprising capacity for wonder.”
—Meditations on the Sand by Alessandro Pronzato
