Stillness is the Key

by Ryan Holiday

A 2017 study actually found that lack of sleep increases negative repetitive thinking. Abusing the body leads the mind to abuse itself.

What study?

Leisure is not the absence of activity, it is activity. What is absent is any external justification—you can’t do leisure for pay, you can’t do it to impress people. You have to do it for you.

To do leisure well—to be present, to be open, to be virtuous, to be connected—is hard. We cannot let it turn into a job, into another thing to dominate and to dominate others through.

Despair and restlessness go together. The problem is that you can’t flee despair. You can’t escape, with your body, problems that exist in your mind and soul. You can’t run away from your choices—you can only fix them with better choices.

But too often, the frenzied or the miserable think that an escape—literal or chemical—is a positive good. Sure, the rush of traveling, the thrill of surfing, or the altered state of a psychedelic can relieve some of the tension that’s built up in our lives. Maybe you get some pretty pictures out of it, and some pseudo-profundity that impresses your friends. But when that wears off? What’s left?

When you defer and delay, interest is accumulating. The bill still comes due . . . and it will be even harder to afford then than it will be right now. The one thing you can’t escape in your life is yourself. Anyone who’s traveled long enough knows this. It’s eventually clear we carry with us on the road more baggage than just our suitcase and our backpacks.

The next time we feel the urge to flee, to hit the road or bury ourselves in work or activity, we need to catch ourselves. Don’t book a cross-country flight—go for a walk instead. Don’t get high—get some solitude, find some quiet. These are far easier, far more accessible, and ultimately far more sustainable strategies for accessing the stillness we were born with. Travel inside your heart and your mind, and let the body stay put. “A quick visit should be enough to ward off all,” Marcus wrote, “and send you back ready to face what awaits you.” Tuning out accomplishes nothing. Tune in.

This realization is Clamence’s undoing and the central focus of the book. Forced to see the hollowness of his pretensions and the shame of his failings, he unravels. He had believed he was a good man, but when the moment (indeed moments) called for goodness, he slunk off into the night.

A person who does good regularly will feel good. A person who contributes to their community will feel like they are a part of one. A person who puts their body to good use—volunteering, protecting, serving, standing up for—will not need to treat it like an amusement park to get some thrills. Virtue is not an abstract notion. We are not clearing our minds and separating the essential from the inessential for the purposes of a parlor trick. Nor are we improving ourselves so that we can get richer or more powerful. We are doing it to live better and be better. Every person we meet and every situation we find ourselves in is an opportunity to prove that.

Will we fall short of our own standards? Yes. When this happens, we don’t need to whip ourselves, as Clamence did, we must simply let it instruct and teach us, as all injuries do.

Dive in when you hear the cry for help. Reach out when you see the need. Do kindness where you can. Because you’ll have to find a way to live with yourself if you don’t.

The denial of this simple, humbling reality—the denial of death—is why we attempt to build monuments to our own greatness, it’s why we worry and argue so much, why we chase pleasure and money and cannot be still while we are alive. It’s ironic that we spend so much of our precious time on earth either impotently fighting death or futilely attempting to ignore the thought of it.

We must learn to think rationally and clearly about our own fate. We must find spiritual meaning and goodness while we are alive. We must treat the vessel we inhabit on this planet well—or we will be forced to abandon it early.