Stillness is the Key

by Ryan Holiday

We have to get better at thinking, deliberately and intentionally, about the big questions. On the complicated things. On understanding what’s really going on with a person, or a situation, or with life itself.

“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” and “What did your face look like before you were born?” and “Does the dog have the Buddha nature?”

The word for this was satori—an illuminating insight when the inscrutable is revealed, when an essential truth becomes obvious and inescapable.

It takes real work to grasp what is invisible to just about everyone else.

Your job, after you have emptied your mind, is to slow down and think. To really think, on a regular basis.

Think about what’s important to you. . . . Think about what’s actually going on. . . . Think about what might be hidden from view. . . . Think about what the rest of the chessboard looks like. . . . Think about what the meaning of life really is.

Sit alone in a room and let your thoughts go wherever they will. Do this for one minute. . . . Work up to ten minutes a day of this mindless mental wandering. Then start paying attention to your thoughts to see if a word or goal materializes. If it doesn’t, extend the exercise to eleven minutes, then twelve, then thirteen . . . until you find the length of time you need to ensure that something interesting will come to mind. The Gaelic phrase for this state of mind is “quietness without loneliness.”

Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. —JACK LONDON

She wrote in that journal as a form of therapy, so as not to unload her troubled thoughts on the family and compatriots with whom she shared such unenviable conditions.

Paper,” she said, “has more patience than people.”

“if at the end of the day they were to review their own behavior and weigh up the rights and wrongs. They would automatically try to do better at the start of each new day, and after a while, would certainly accomplish a great deal.”

doodler (which is shown in studies to improve memory)

Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, seems to have done his writing and reflection in the evenings,

I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.”

the sleep which follows this self-examination”

“weapon for spiritual combat,”

a way to practice philosophy and purge the mind of agitation and foolishness and to overcome difficulty.

Journaling is a way to ask tough questions: Where am I standing in my own way? What’s the smallest step I can take toward a big thing today? Why am I so worked up about this? What blessings can I count right now? Why do I care so much about impressing people? What is the harder choice I’m avoiding? Do I rule my fears, or do they rule me? How will today’s difficulties reveal my character?

people were able to better recover from divorce and move forward if they journaled on the experience.

To get something off your chest. To have quiet time with your thoughts. To clarify those thoughts. To separate the harmful from the insightful.

am taking up my Journal again after a long break. I think it may be a way of calming this nervous excitement that has been worrying me for so long.

It’s a break from the world. A framework for the day ahead.

Just know that it may turn out to be the most important thing you do all day.

All profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence. . . . Silence is the general consecration of the universe. —HERMAN MELVILLE

hear what other people think.”

To Cage, silence was not necessarily the absence of all sound. He loved the sound of a truck at 50 miles an hour. Static on the radio. The hum of an amplifier. The sound of water on water. Most of all, he appreciated the sounds that were missed or overwhelmed by our noisy lives.

“In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action.”

“What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”

They’d rather close their mind than sit there and have to use it.

The answers were things like sailing, long-distance cycling, listening quietly to classical music, scuba diving, riding motorcycles, and fly-fishing. All these activities, he noticed, had one thing in common: an absence of voices.

The ticking of the hands of your watch is telling you how time is passing away, never to return. Listen to it.

Imperturbable wisdom is worth everything. —DEMOCRITUS

“he knew nothing except just the fact of his ignorance.”

Why do you think that? How do you know? What evidence do you have? But what about this or that?

Both the Epicureans and the Stoics held sophia up as a core tenet. In their view, wisdom was gained through experience and study.

be as wise as snakes and as innocent as doves.

The noble person who studies widely and examines himself each day will become clear in his knowing and faultless in his conduct.”

The need to ask questions.

The need to study and reflect.

importance of intellectual humility. The power of experiences—most of all failure and mistakes—to open our e...

wisdom is a sense of the big picture, the accumulation of experience and the ability to rise above the biases, the ...

“I cannot understand,” he said, “how some people can live without communicating with the wisest people who ever lived on earth.”

People who don’t read have no advantage over those who cannot read.

That’s not wisdom. Or even stupidity. That’s insanity.

Zeno,

“Where can I find a man like that?”

Answering the call and going forth.

Buddha’s first teacher was an ascetic named Alara Kalama, who taught him the basics of meditation.

the limitations of the existing schools and consider striking out on his own.

Zeno and Buddha needed teachers to advance, then we will definitely need help. And the ability to admit that is evidence of not a small bit of wisdom!