Journal

That is the amount of time – on average, give or take a few weeks – that each of us has in this life. When you look at it this way it's a terrifyingly short amount of time.

A natural reaction to this is to charge around ever faster, trying to get as much done as possible, ticking off our bucket lists. But the truth is it's an impossible task that we can't hope to achieve. Instead in Oliver Burke's book, 'Four Thousand Weeks', he counsels the opposite. Suggesting instead that we need to slow down, reflect, and identify what is really important to us.

We spend our lives dashing from home, to school, to work, to meeting, to meeting, to meeting, to home, to gym, eating on the go, checking emails as we walk, constantly bombarded by advertising, signs, messages. We live with our heads down. Who ever really stops – really stops - and observes what's around them?

This is why I took some of the team from Bell Phillips to Tate Modern to undertake an exercise in slow looking. The task was to select an artwork, sit individually and observe it for an hour. No phones, no discussion, no distractions – just you and the artwork in isolation. It wasn't an exercise in art critique or appreciation, it was an exercise in concentrating, thinking, observing and cutting out the background noise.

I found myself with a painting by Gerhard Richter which I later found out was based on the music of John Cage, but which put me in mind of the oily reflection of a post-industrial waterway. As I spent more time with the painting it gradually revealed how much colour – how many layers of paint – had been built up and rubbed away. I found myself considering the process of making, the scraping, smearing, dragging, considering the viscosity of the paint, how long it had dried before being worked into, whether it had been created horizontally or vertically. The sub-structure of the canvas gradually revealed itself picked out in subtle lines, ridges of paint.

For the first time in many years, I just sat, quietly, without distractions, without the comfort blanket of my phone.

If you find yourself needing time out from the demands of modern life, then you should try it. Of course, you'll probably say you don't have the time, but that's the point.