Pico Iyer and The Art of Stillness

One of the books I read while in Grand Cayman was The Art of Stillness:  Adventures in Going Nowhere, by my favorite travel writer, Pico Iyer.  This slim volume, one Iyer means for you to be able to read easily in a single short setting, is one of the new TED Books.  In it, Iyer turns from outward journeys to an inward trek and focuses on the value of finding stillness, of going nowhere at all.

If I've already made the book sound more than a bit crunchy, that's because it is--but it's also refreshingly practical and grounded.  Iyer offers several suggestions that any of us could easily follow, and he also suggests that companies would be wise to encourage their employees to take periodic breaks and instead find their own roads to stillness.

Eloquent and evocative, Iyer's prose makes the book a pleasure to read.  I have been thinking a great deal about it since I read it, and I am increasingly determined to make some changes in my own life to reintroduce the moments of stillness I once sought regularly.

On a dollars-per-minute basis, The Art of Stillness is far from a bargain, but it's still ten bucks (at least at Amazon) well spent.  I very much recommend it.