Stillness is the Key

by Ryan Holiday

Most people never learn that their accomplishments will ultimately fail to provide the relief and happiness we tell ourselves they will.

This is it? Now what?

how the mentality that gets an athlete to the top so often prevents them from enjoying the thing they worked so hard for. The need for progress can be the enemy of enjoying the process.

The creep of more, more, more is like a hydra.

Satisfy one—lop it off the bucket list—and two more grow in its place.

“When you realize there is nothing lacking,” Lao Tzu says, “the whole world belongs to you.”

The greatest misfortune is to not know contentment. The word calamity is the desire to acquire. And so those who know the contentment of contentment are always content.

“Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.”

“To have blessings and to prize them is to be in Heaven; to have them and not to prize them is to be in Hell. . . . To prize them and not to have them is to be in Hell.”

Temperance. That’s the key. Intellectually, we know this. It’s only

in flashes of insight or tragedy that we feel it.

“little engine that knew no rest.”

You will never feel okay by way of external accomplishments. Enough comes from the inside. It comes from stepping off the train. From seeing what you already have, what you’ve always had.

We think we need more and don’t realize we already have so much. We

No one does their best work driven by anxiety, and no one should be breeding insecurity in themselves so that they might keep making things.

Killing ourselves does nothing for anybody.

You can be healthy and still and successful.

It’s not accomplishments. It’s not popularity. It’s moments when we feel like we are enough.

More presence. More clarity. More insight. More truth. More stillness.

In the face of the Sublime, we feel a shiver . . . something too large for our minds to encompass. And for a moment, it shakes us out of our smugness and releases us from the deathlike grip of habit and banality. —ROBERT GREENE

“Beauty remains, even in misfortune,”

“If you just look for it, you discover more and more happiness and regain your balance.”

You open the farm for me and I will talk to you about the great principle of Zen.” After they finished their labors and walked to the master for their lesson, he simply turned to face the fields, which the sun was just then rising above, extended his arms out in the direction of the serene expanse, and said nothing.

the ability to see beauty everywhere, even in the banal or the terrible.

Why else would he write so vividly of the ordinary way that “baking bread splits in places and those cracks, while not intended in the baker’s art, catch our eye and serve to stir our appetite,” or the “charm and allure” of nature’s process, the “stalks of ripe grain bending low, the frowning brow of the lion, the foam dripping from the boar’s mouth.” Even of dying, he writes, “Pass through this brief patch of time in harmony with nature. Come to your final resting place gracefully, just as a ripened olive might drop, praising the earth that nourished it and grateful to the tree that gave it growth.”

even the word wildness itself was music.

It’s music we can listen to anytime we like, wherever we live, whatever we do for a living. Even if we can’t visit, we can think of traipsing through the pine-bedded floor of the forest, of drifting down a slow-moving river, of the warmth of a campfire.

It is better to find beauty in all places and things.

It’s ironic that stillness is rare and fleeting in our busy lives, because the world creates an inexhaustible supply of it.

The Japanese have a concept, shinrin yoku—forest bathing—which is a form of therapy that uses nature as a treatment for mental and spiritual issues.

Bathe is an important word. There is something about water, isn’t there? The sight of it. The sound of it. The feel of it. Those seeking stillness could find worse ways to wash away the troubles and turbulence of the world than actual water. A dive into a nearby river. The bubbling fountain in a Zen garden. The reflecting pool of a memorial for those we have lost. Even, in a pinch, a sound machine loaded with the noises of the crashing ocean waves.

Get out now. Not just outside, but beyond the trap of the programmed electronic age so gently closing around so many people. . . . Go outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, look around. Do not jog. Do not run. . . . Instead pay attention to everything that abuts the rural road, the city street, the suburban boulevard. Walk. Stroll. Saunter. Ride a bike and coast along a lot. Explore.

It’s not admitting you have a problem, finding a sponsor, or attending meetings.

Acknowledging a higher power is difficult because submitting to anything other than their own desires is anathema to what one addict describes as the “pathological self-centeredness” of addiction.

Because Step 2 isn’t really about God. It’s about surrender. It’s about faith.

admitting that there is something bigger than you out there is an important breakthrough. It means an addict finally understands that they are not God, that they are not in control, and really never have been. By the way, none of us are.

It’s the decision to stop and to listen and to follow that does all the work.

logos—the path of the universe.

dao—the Way—is

daemon, a guiding spirit that led them to their destiny.

Tian, 天—a concept of heaven that guided us while we were here on earth and assigned us a role or purpose in life.

that Brahman was the highest universal reality. In ...

Great Spirit, who was their creator and guiding deity.

There is no stillness to the mind that thinks of nothing but itself, nor will there ever be peace for the body and spirit that follow their every urge and value nothing but themselves.

Realism is important. Pragmatism and scientism and skepticism are too. They all have their place. But still, you have to believe in something. You just have to. Or else everything is empty and cold.

Something bigger than we can possibly comprehend. Something longer than our tiny humanness naturally considers.

Even if we are the products of evolution and randomness, does this not take us right back to the position of the Stoics? As subjects to the laws of gravity and physics, are we not already accepting a higher, inexplicable power?

There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with. —SENECA

“than the discipline I put on myself of having responsibility, having another human being—my wife—that I have to answer

It is also true that the single best decision you can make in life, professionally and personally, is to find a partner who complements and supports you and makes you better and for whom you do the same.