‘The Bliss Station’
Travel and visitors have knocked me out of my traditional routines lately, and with the lack of normality I’ve decided to take a moment to reassess.
Taking the time to honestly assess my habits, one of the things I realized I’ve been least happy with lately is my reliance on social media in the morning. Somewhere along the way, I started waking up, reaching for my phone, and spending the first few minutes of the morning browsing Twitter and catching up on the events of the last dozen hours or so.
This has not been a habit I’ve enjoyed, and I recently read a short article by Austin Kleon on Joseph Campbell that made me pause.
Kleon wrote on a passage from ‘The Power of Myth’ where Campbell describes his idea of a ‘bliss station’:
What’s a bliss station? Here’s Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth:
“You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”
My wife pointed out to me that Campbell says you must have a room OR a certain hour — whether Campbell really meant this or not, she suggested that maybe it’s possible that a bliss station can be not just a where, but a when. Not just a sacred space, but also a sacred time.
A sacred space or a sacred time. Now that’s a beautiful sentiment.
As soon as I read these words I knew that I was going to make some morning changes, effective immediately. We live in an era where there is always something vying for our attention; each news story demanding our eyeballs, our thoughts, and our time and each social network feeding on our constant connection to them, our likes, and our passing moments.
I think it is necessary to have some space and some time completely separated from them. The idea of a ‘bliss station’ is that space and time, and if feel called to create something ourselves — or perhaps even if we are just trying to stay sane — we need a moment’s reprieve from that noise.
So here’s my new setup: When I wake up, I simply ensure that I take the first hour completely to myself. I move from the bedroom to the living room, watch the sun rise through he windows, and I resist the temptation to check on the rest of the world. It can all wait, because the next hour of my life is focused on the long-lasting, not the momentary.
It’s been a beautiful, live-giving thing.
