Stillness is the Key

by Ryan Holiday

The Daodejing.

Trust no future, howe’er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act,—act in the living present! Heart within, and God o’erhead! —HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

We do not live in this moment. We, in fact, try desperately to get out of it—by thinking, doing, talking, worrying, remembering, hoping, whatever. We pay thousands of dollars to have a device in our pocket to ensure that we are never bored. We sign up for endless activities and obligations, chase money and accomplishments, all with the naïve belief that at the end of it will be happiness.

Tolstoy observed that love can’t exist off in the future. Love is only real if it’s happening right now.

Remember, there’s no greatness in the future. Or clarity. Or insight. Or happiness. Or peace. There is only this moment. Not that we mean literally sixty seconds. The real present moment is what we choose to exist in, instead of lingering on the past or fretting about the future. It’s however long we can push away the impressions of what’s happened before and what we worry or hope might occur at some other time. Right now can be a few minutes or a morning or a year—if you can stay in it that long.

Who is so certain that they’ll get another moment that they can confidently skip over this one? The less energy we waste regretting the past or worrying about the future, the more energy we will have for what’s in front of us.

Don’t reject a difficult or boring moment because it is not exactly what you want. Don’t waste a beautiful moment because you are insecure or shy. Make what you can of what you have been given. Live what can be lived. That’s what excellence is. That’s what presence makes possible.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. —HERBERT SIMON

“If you wish to improve,” Epictetus once said, “be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.”

It’s as true of food as it is of information. There’s a great saying: Garbage in, garbage out. If you want good output, you have to watch over the inputs. This will take discipline. It will not be easy. This means fewer alerts and notifications. It means blocking incoming texts with the Do Not Disturb function and funneling emails to subfolders. It means questioning that “open door” policy, or even where you live. It means pushing away selfish people who bring needless drama into our lives. It means studying the world more philosophically—that is, with a long-term perspective—rather than following events second by second.

I realized I had been afraid of the silence.

Whatever you face, whatever you’re doing will require, first and foremost, that you don’t defeat yourself. That you don’t make it harder by overthinking, by needless doubts, or by second-guessing.

The world is like muddy water. To see through it, we have to let things settle. We can’t be disturbed by initial appearances, and if we are patient and still, the truth will be revealed to us.

So much of the distress we feel comes from reacting instinctually instead of acting with conscientious deliberation. So much of what we get wrong comes from the same place. We’re reacting to shadows. We’re taking as certainties impressions we have yet to test.

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?

Too much of our lives is defined by noise. Headphones go in (noise-canceling headphones so that we can better hear . . . noise). Screens on. Phones ringing. The quiet metal womb of a jumbo jet, traveling at 600 miles per hour, is filled with nothing but people trying to avoid silence. They’d rather watch the same bad movies again and again, or listen to some inane interview with an annoying celebrity, than stop and absorb what’s happening around them. They’d rather close their mind than sit there and have to use it.

Each of us needs to cultivate those moments in our lives. Where we limit our inputs and turn down the volume so that we can access a deeper awareness of what’s going on around us. In shutting up—even if only for a short period—we can finally hear what the world has been trying to tell us. Or what we’ve been trying to tell ourselves. That quiet is so rare is a sign of its value. Seize it. We can’t be afraid of silence, as it has much to teach us. Seek it. The ticking of the hands of your watch is telling you how time is passing away, never to return. Listen to it.

We want to sit with doubt. We want to savor it. We want to follow it where it leads. Because on the other side is truth.

If you’re miserable every time things are not going your way, if you cannot enjoy it when things are going your way because you undermine it with doubts and insecurity, life will be hell.

This is key. Both egotistical and insecure people make their flaws central to their identity—either by covering them up or by brooding over them or externalizing them.

The gift of free will is that in this life we can choose to be good or we can choose to be bad. We can choose what standards to hold ourselves to and what we will regard as important, honorable, and admirable. The choices we make in that regard determine whether we will experience peace or not. Which is why each of us needs to sit down and examine ourselves. What do we stand for? What do we believe to be essential and important? What are we really living for? Deep in the marrow of our bones, in the chambers of our heart, we know the answer. The problem is that the busyness of life, the realities of pursuing a career and surviving in the world, come between us and that self-knowledge.

Many of us carry wounds from our childhood. Maybe someone didn’t treat us right. Or we experienced something terrible. Or our parents were just a little too busy or a little too critical or a little too stuck dealing with their own issues to be what we needed. These raw spots shape decisions we make and actions we take—even if we’re not always conscious of that fact. This should be a relief: The source of our anxiety and worry, the frustrations that seem to suddenly pop out in inappropriate situations, the reason we have trouble staying in relationships or ignoring criticism—it isn’t us. Well, it is us, just not adult us. It’s the seven-year-old living inside us.

But with that realization came stillness, if only because it deintensified arguments at work. Think about it: How much better and less scary life is when we don’t have to see it from the perspective of a scared, vulnerable child? How much lighter will our load be if we’re not adding extra baggage on top? It will take patience and empathy and real self-love to heal the wounds in your life.

Take the time to think about the pain you carry from your early experiences. Think about the “age” of the emotional reactions you have when you are hurt or betrayed or unexpectedly challenged in some way. That’s your inner child. They need a hug from you. They need you to say, “Hey, buddy. It’s okay. I know you’re hurt, but I am going to take care of you.” The functional adult steps in to reassert and reassure. To make stillness possible. We owe it to ourselves as well as to the people in our lives to do this. Each of us must break the link in the chain of what the Buddhists call samsara, the continuation of life’s suffering from generation to generation.

Indeed, most desires are at their core irrational emotions, and that’s why stillness requires that we sit down and dissect them. We want to think ahead to the refractory period, to consider the inevitable hangover before we take a drink. When we do that, these desires lose some of their power.

To have an impulse and to resist it, to sit with it and examine it, to let it pass by like a bad smell—this is how we develop spiritual strength. This is how we become who we want to be in this world. Only those of us who take the time to explore, to question, to extrapolate the consequences of our desires have an opportunity to overcome them and to stop regrets before they start. Only they know that real pleasure lies in having a soul that’s true and stable, happy and secure.

No ceaseless wanting. No insecurity of comparison. Feeling satisfied with yourself and your work? What gift! Saying the word “enough” is not enough. Deeply spiritual, introspective work is required to understand what that idea means—work that may well destroy illusions and assumptions we have held our entire lives.

Most people never learn that their accomplishments will ultimately fail to provide the relief and happiness we tell ourselves they will. Or they come to understand this only after so much time and money, so many relationships and moments of inner peace, were sacrificed on the altar of achievement. We get to the finish line only to think: This is it? Now what?

More does nothing for the one who feels less than, who cannot see the wealth that was given to them at birth, that they have accumulated in their relationships and experiences. Solving your problem of poverty is an achievable goal and can be fixed by earning and saving money. No one could seriously claim otherwise. The issue is when we think these activities can address spiritual poverty.

If you believe there is ever some point where you will feel like you’ve “made it,” when you’ll finally be good, you are in for an unpleasant surprise. Or worse, a sort of Sisyphean torture where just as that feeling appears to be within reach, the goal is moved just a little bit farther up the mountain and out of reach.

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. That is not industry, that is slavery.

It’s perfectly possible to do and make good work from a good place. You can be healthy and still and successful.

Don’t let the beauty of life escape you. See the world as the temple that it is.

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.

If we told a Zen Buddhist from Japan in the twelfth century that in the future everyone could count on greater wealth and longer lives but that in most cases those gifts would be followed by a feeling of utter purposelessness and dissatisfaction, do you think they would want to trade places with us?

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.

Nihilism is a fragile strategy. It’s always the nihilists who seem to go crazy or kill themselves when life gets hard. (Or, more recently, are so afraid of dying that they obsess about living forever.) Why is that? Because the nihilist is forced to wrestle with the immense complexity and difficulty and potential emptiness of life (and death) with nothing but their own mind. This is a comically unfair mismatch. Again, when nearly all the wise people of history agree, we should pause and reflect. It’s next to impossible to find an ancient philosophical school that does not talk about a higher power (or higher powers). Not because they had “evidence” of its existence, but because they knew how powerful faith and belief were, how essential they were to the achievement of stillness and inner peace. Fundamentalism is different. Epicurus was right—if God exists, why would they possibly want you to be afraid of them? And why would they care what clothes you wear or how many times you pay obeisance to them per day? What interest would they have in monuments or in fearful pleas for forgiveness? At the purest level, the only thing that matters to any father or mother—or any creator—is that their children find peace, find meaning, find purpose. They certainly did not put us on this planet so we could judge, control, or kill each other. But this is not the problem most of us are dealing with. Instead we struggle with skepticism, with an egotism that puts us at the center of the univers...

Life without relationships, focused solely on accomplishment, is empty and meaningless (in addition to being precarious and fragile). A life solely about work and doing is terribly out of balance; indeed, it requires constant motion and busyness to keep from falling apart.

Your house might be quieter without kids and it might be easier to work longer hours without someone waiting for you at the dinner table, but it is a hollow quiet and an empty ease.

To go through our days looking out for no one but ourselves? To think that we can or must do this all alone? To accrue mastery or genius, wealth or power, solely for our own benefit? What is the point? By ourselves, we are a fraction of what we can be. By ourselves, something is missing, and, worse, we feel that in our bones. Which is why stillness requires other people; indeed, it is for other people.

Seneca’s argument was that anger ultimately blocks us from whatever goal we are trying to achieve. While it might temporarily help us achieve success in our chosen field, in the long run it is destructive.

Anger is counterproductive. The flash of rage here, an outburst at the incompetence around us there—this may generate a moment of raw motivation or even a feeling of relief, but we rarely tally up the frustration they cause down the road. Even if we apologize or the good we do outweighs the harm, damage remains—and consequences follow. The person we yelled at is now an enemy. The drawer we broke in a fit is now a constant annoyance. The high blood pressure, the overworked heart, inching us closer to the attack that will put us in the hospital or the grave.

The point is that people who are driven by anger are not happy. They are not still. They get in their own way. They shorten legacies and short-circuit their goals.

The less we are convinced of our exceptionalism, the greater ability we have to understand and contribute to our environment, the less blindly driven we are by our own needs, the more clearly we can appreciate the needs of those around us, the more we can appreciate the larger ecosystem of which we are a part.

A long-distance runner who can’t pace himself. A money manager who can’t wait out a bear market. If they can’t learn the art of wu wei in their professions, they won’t succeed. If you can’t do it in your life, forget about success, you’ll burn out your body.

we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

The best car is not the one that turns the most heads, but the one you have to worry about the least. The best clothes are the ones that are the most comfortable, that require you to spend the least amount of time shopping—regardless of what the magazines say. The best house for you is the one that feels the most like home. Don’t use your money to purchase loneliness, or headaches, or status anxiety.

Pacing is something athletes are often forced to come to terms with as they age, while young athletes needlessly burn themselves out because they think they have a bottomless well of energy. Yes, there is purity and meaning in giving your best to whatever you do—but life is much more of a marathon than it is a sprint. In a way, this is the distinction between confidence and ego. Can you trust yourself and your abilities enough to keep something in reserve? Can you protect the stillness and the inner peace necessary to win the longer race of life?

Good decisions are not made by those who are running on empty. What kind of interior life can you have, what kind of thinking can you do, when you’re utterly and completely overworked? It’s a vicious cycle: We end up having to work more to fix the errors we made when we would have been better off resting, having consciously said no instead of reflexively saying yes. We end up pushing good people away (and losing relationships) because we’re wound so tight and have so little patience.

Indeed, your mind and soul are incapable of peace when your body is battling for survival, when it is drawing on its reserves for even basic functioning. Happiness? Stillness? Milking the solitude or beauty out of your surroundings? Out of the question for the exhausted, overworked fool.