I sit to open my pores, skin and mind both to the life that surrounds me, inside and outside, at least more often if not all the time, as it arrives at my doorstep. I feel a need for a rudder, a keel, a technique, a method, a way to continue on course. While sitting one does not get up, or move, or make that dollar, or pass that test, or receive reassurance from that phone call. But military training, or violin lessons, or medical school, are also routes to self-control in this ordering and restrictive sense. Sitting is self-control around specific values.
Observation replaces all action.
Of course, those will happen anyway. They are part of the human make-up. Cultures would not have proliferated the ubiquitous moral codes, the ten commandments, the five precepts, if we were not so replete with ten million urges. There is little I have heard from others and it is my daily business to listen that I have not seen in myself as I sit. But I also know the necessity of work, training and restraint.