Excerpt from Books for Living by Will Schwalbe, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

As it turns out, it's always been hard. My behavior is nothing new. And I can't blame it solely on the devices.

Even when I leave my iPhone in my pocket, I still have trouble sitting and doing nothing. The hustle and bustle again comes with me, in my mind. What I am struck by again and again reading The Importance of Living is that it calls for a fundamental shift not in how I behave—­when I look at my cell phone; when I don't—­but in how I think about everything.

Take Lin's love of lying in bed. Lying in bed isn't an activity—­it's a way of slowing down life. You can ponder, listen, or even read. So it's while lying in bed that I often read The Importance of Living. It's a book that lends itself to short-­burst reading. Every few pages there's some sentence that keeps me thinking for hours, or intermittently throughout the day. For example, "I consider the education of our senses and our emotions rather more important than the education of our ideas."

The more I read The Importance of Living, the more I realize it's quite the opposite of an idle philosophy. It's a book that lives up to the promise of its title.

Excerpted from Books for Living by Will Schwalbe. Copyright © 2016 by Will Schwalbe. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.