Stillness is the Key: An Ancient Strategy for Modern Life

by Ryan Holiday

When you step back from the enormity of your own immediate experience—whatever it is—you are able to see the experience of others and either connect with them or lessen the intensity of your own pain. We are all strands in a long rope that stretches back countless generations and ties together every person in every country on every continent. We are all thinking and feeling the same things, we are all made of and motivated by the same things. We are all stardust. And no one needs this understanding more than the ambitious or the creative, since they live so much in their own heads and in their own bubble.

Finding the universal in the personal, and the personal in the universal, is not only the secret to art and leadership and even entrepreneurship, it is the secret to centering oneself. It both turns down the volume of noise in the world and tunes one in to the quiet wavelength of wisdom that sages and philosophers have long been on. This connectedness and universality does not need to stop at our fellow man.

We are one big collective organism engaged in one endless project together. We are one. We are the same. Still, too often we forget it, and we forget ourselves in the process.

L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. What’s essential is invisible to the eye.

Stillness isn’t merely an abstraction—something we only think about or feel. It’s also real. It’s in our bodies. Seneca warned us not to “suppose that the soul is at peace when the body is still.” Vice versa. Lao Tzu said that “movement is the foundation of stillness.”

Life is hard. Fortune is fickle. We can’t afford to be weak. We can’t afford to be fragile. We must strengthen our bodies as the physical vessel for our minds and spirit, subject to the capriciousness of the physical world. Which is why we now move on to this final domain of stillness—the body—and its place in the real world. In real life.

It’s a balance that everyone aspiring to sustained inner peace must strike. Mens sana in corpore sano—a strong mind in a strong body. Remember, when we say that someone “showed so much heart,” we don’t mean emotion. We mean they had tenacity and grit. The metaphor is actually misleading if you think about it. It’s really the spine—the backbone of body—that’s doing the work.

Churchill was a hard worker and a man of discipline—but like us, he was not perfect. He often worked more than he should have, usually because he spent more money than he needed to (and it produced a fair bit of writing that would have better remained unpublished). Churchill was impetuous, liked to gamble, and was prone to overcommit. It wasn’t from the tireless execution of his wartime duties that he was inspired to depict himself once, in a drawing, as a pig carrying a twenty-thousand-pound weight. It was his indulgences that produced that.

If we are to be half as productive as Churchill, and manage to capture the same joy and zest and stillness that defined his life, there are traits we will need to cultivate. Each of us will: • Rise above our physical limitations. • Find hobbies that rest and replenish us. • Develop a reliable, disciplined routine. • Spend time getting active outdoors. • Seek out solitude and perspective. • Learn to sit—to do nothing when called for. • Get enough sleep and rein in our workaholism. • Commit to causes bigger than ourselves.

As they say, the body keeps score. If we don’t take care of ourselves physically, if we don’t align ourselves properly, it doesn’t matter how strong we are mentally or spiritually.

It will take our body—our habits, our actions, our rituals, our self-care—to get our mind and our spirit in the right place, just as it takes our mind and spirit to get our body to the right place.

We should look fearfully, even sympathetically, at the people who have become slaves to their calendars, who require a staff of ten to handle all their ongoing projects, whose lives seem to resemble a fugitive fleeing one scene for the next. There is no stillness there. It’s servitude.

When we know what to say no to, we can say yes to the things that matter.

In short, mental and spiritual independence matter little if the things we own in the physical world end up owning us.

Living outside your means—as Churchill could attest—is not glamorous. Behind the appearances, it’s exhausting. It’s also dangerous. The person who is afraid to lose their stuff, who has their identity wrapped up in their things, gives their enemies an opening. They make themselves extra vulnerable to fate.

The playwright Tennessee Williams spoke of luxury as the “wolf at the door.” It wasn’t the possessions that were the problem, he said, but the dependency. He called it the catastrophe of success, the way that we become less and less able to do things ourselves, the more and more we cannot be without a certain level of service. Not only is all your stuff a mess, but you need to pay someone to come clean it up.

But it could also be argued that any positive trait—even hard work—taken to excess becomes a vice.

Is that what you want to be? A workhorse that draws its load until it collapses and dies, still shod and in the harness? Is that what you were put on this planet for?

It’s human being, not human doing, for a reason. Moderation. Being present. Knowing your limits. This is the key. The body that each of us has was a gift. Don’t work it to death. Don’t burn it out. Protect the gift.

Sleep is the other side of the work we’re doing—sleep is the recharging of the internal batteries whose energy stores we recruit in order to do our work. It is a meditative practice. It is stillness. It’s the time when we turn off. It’s built into our biology for a reason.

It was all there. It was brilliant. It was the product of a rested mind that took care of its body. A healthy soul that could sleep soundly. And it has echoed down through the ages. If you want peace, there is just one thing to do. If you want to be your best, there is just one thing to do. Go to sleep.

Reading. Boxing. Collecting stamps. Whatever. Let it relax you and give you peace.

You have to do it for you. But the good news is that leisure can be anything. It can be cutting down trees, or learning another language. Camping or restoring old cars. Writing poetry or knitting. Running marathons, riding horses, or walking the beach with a metal detector. It can be, as it was for Churchill, painting or bricklaying.