The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere (TED Books)

by Pico Iyer

Sitting still, he said with unexpected passion, was “the real deep entertainment” he had found in his sixty-one years on the planet. “Real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment.

Going nowhere, as Cohen described it, was the grand adventure that makes sense of everywhere else.

One could start just by taking a few minutes out of every day to sit quietly and do nothing, letting what moves one rise to the surface. One could take a few days out of every season to go on retreat or enjoy a long walk in the wilderness, recalling what lies deeper than the moment or the self. One could even, as Cohen was doing, try to find a life in which stage sets and performances disappear and one is reminded, at a level deeper than all words, how making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.

Americans were actually working fewer hours than we did in the 1960s, but we feel as if we’re working more. We have the sense, too often, of running at top speed and never being able to catch up.

Alice & The Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, running as fast as you can just to stay in one place; Pink Floyd “you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking”

don’t claim to have any answers, only questions that you can deepen or open further out. But I’d been reminded on the mountain that talking about stillness is really a way of talking about clarity and sanity and the joys that endure.

all the institutions of higher skepticism to which he’d so generously sent me had insisted that the point of life was to get somewhere in the world, not to go nowhere. But the nowhere I was interested in had more corners and dimensions than I could possibly express to him (or myself), and somehow seemed larger and more unfathomable than the endlessly diverting life I’d known in the city;

Going nowhere, as Leonard Cohen would later emphasize for me, isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.

To hurry around trying to find happiness outside ourselves makes about as much sense as the comical figure in the Islamic parable who, having lost a key in his living room, goes out into the street to look for it because there’s more light there.

As America’s wisest psychologist, William James, reminded us, “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” It’s the perspective we choose—not the places we visit—that ultimately tells us where we stand.

It’s just a reminder that it’s not the physical movement that carries us up so much as the spirit we bring to it.

As Henry David Thoreau, one of the great explorers of his time, reminded himself in his journal, “It matters not where or how far you travel—the farther commonly the worse—but how much alive you are.”

But at some point all the horizontal trips in the world can’t compensate for the need to go deep into somewhere challenging and unexpected.

Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else.

finding what feels like real life, that changeless and inarguable something behind all our shifting thoughts, is less a discovery than a recollection.

maybe you have to taste quite a few of the alternatives to see the point in stillness.

Our job, you could say, is to turn, through stillness, a life of movement into art.

Sitting still is our workplace, sometimes our battlefield.

But, like many a wanderer, he seemed always to know that it’s only when you stop moving that you can be moved in some far deeper way

how getting caught up in the world and expecting to find happiness there made about as much sense as reaching into a fire and hoping not to get burned.

those who had sat still for years had achieved a level of happiness that was, quite literally, off the charts,

Clouds and blue sky, of course, are how Buddhists explain the nature of our mind: there may be clouds passing across it, but that doesn’t mean a blue sky isn’t always there behind the obscurations. All you need is the patience to sit still until the blue shows up again.

Nowhere can be scary, even if it’s a destination you’ve chosen; there’s nowhere to hide there. Being locked inside your head can drive you mad or leave you with a devil who tells you to stay at home and stay at home till you are so trapped inside your thoughts that you can’t step out or summon the power of intention.

As in any love affair, the early days of a romance with stillness give little sign of the hard work to come.

One of the laws of sitting still, in fact, is that “if you enter it with the set purpose of seeking contemplation, or, worse still, happiness, you will find neither. For neither can be found unless it is first in some sense renounced.”

a man sitting still is alone, often, with the memory of all he doesn’t have. And what he does have can look very much like nothing.

You don’t get over the shadows inside you simply by walking away from them.

“Half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.”

It’s easy to feel as if we’re standing two inches away from a huge canvas that’s noisy and crowded and changing with every microsecond. It’s only by stepping farther back and standing still that we can begin to see what that canvas (which is our life) really means, and to take in the larger picture.

saw their levels of stress dropping by a third after only an hour of yoga each week.

a form of preemptive medicine at a time when the World Health Organization has been widely quoted as stating that “stress will be the health epidemic of the twenty-first century.”

If it does have benefits, they lie within some invisible account with a high interest rate but very long-term yields, to be drawn upon at that moment, surely inevitable, when a doctor walks into your room, shaking his head, or another car veers in front of yours, and all you have to draw upon is what you’ve collected in your deeper moments. But there’s no questioning the need for clarity and focus, especially when the stakes are highest.

His adviser assured him that he was no less alert than before, just more selective about the “potential threats or targets to respond to. Which allowed me,” Andrew went on, “to ignore many of the things I would normally pay attention to and to enjoy daily life more instead.”

But twenty-two veterans are taking their own lives around us every day, and their average age is twenty-five. It doesn’t seem crazy to think that training minds might help save lives at least as much as training bodies does.

the reason a certain kind of writer will include a lot of blank space on a page, so his sentences have room to breathe (and his readers, too).

One day Mahatma Gandhi was said to have woken up and told those around him, “This is going to be a very busy day. I won’t be able to meditate for an hour.” His friends were taken aback at this rare break from his discipline. “I’ll have to meditate for two,” he spelled out.

Yet it’s precisely those who are busiest, I wanted to tell her, who most need to give themselves a break.

And the more we can contact others, the more, it sometimes seems, we lose contact with ourselves.

But even for the rest of us, it’s like a retreat house that ensures we’ll have something bright and purposeful to carry back into the other six days.

The places that move us most deeply, as I found in the monastery, are often the ones we recognize like long-lost friends; we come to them with a piercing sense of familiarity, as if returning to some source we already know.

Like Columbus 💜

Stillness has nothing to do with settledness or stasis.

“One of the strange laws of the contemplative life,” Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, “is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.”

It’s only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day.

find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.