Stillness is the Key

by Ryan Holiday

“All of humanity’s problems,” Blaise Pascal said in 1654, “stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Careful as someone crossing an iced-over stream. Alert as a warrior in enemy territory. Courteous as a guest. Fluid as melting ice. Shapable as a block of wood. Receptive as a valley. Clear as a glass of water.

Be fully present. Empty our mind of preconceptions. Take our time. Sit quietly and reflect. Reject distraction. Weigh advice against the counsel of our convictions. Deliberate without being paralyzed.

We must cultivate mental stillness to succeed in life and to successfully navigate the many crises it throws our way.

“People don’t understand that the hardest thing is actually doing something that is close to nothing,” Abramović said about the performance. “It demands all of you . . . there is no object to hide behind. It’s just you.”

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.

Remember, there’s no greatness in the future. Or clarity. Or insight. Or happiness. Or peace. There is only this moment.

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.

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

There is ego in trying to stay up on everything,

The verse from John Ferriar: What wild desires, what restless torments seize The hapless man, who feels the book-disease.

Thich Nhat Hanh: Before we can make deep changes in our lives, we have to look into our diet, our way of consuming. We have to live in such a way that we stop consuming the things that poison us and intoxicate us. Then we will have the strength to allow the best in us to arise, and we will no longer be victims of anger, of frustration.

Zen proverb to himself: Chop wood, carry water.

Don’t overanalyze. Do the work.

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.

satori—an illuminating insight when the inscrutable is revealed, when an essential truth becomes obvious and inescapable.

Michel Foucault talked of the ancient genre of hupomnemata (notes to oneself). He called the journal a “weapon for spiritual combat,” a way to practice philosophy and purge the mind of agitation and foolishness and to overcome difficulty. To silence the barking dogs in your head. To prepare for the day ahead. To reflect on the day that has passed.

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

Tolstoy expressed his exasperation at people who didn’t read deeply and regularly. “I cannot understand,” he said, “how some people can live without communicating with the wisest people who ever lived on earth.”

The closer we get to mastery, the less we care about specific results. The more collaborative and creative we are able to be, the less we will tolerate ego or insecurity. The more at peace we are, the more productive we can be.

“The mind tends toward stillness,” Lao Tzu said, “but is opposed by craving.”

Most of us would be seized with fear if our bodies went numb, and would do everything possible to avoid it, yet we take no interest at all in the numbing of our souls. —EPICTETUS

Mental stillness will be short-lived if our hearts are on fire, or our souls ache with emptiness.

We are incapable of seeing what is essential in the world if we are blind to what’s going on within us. We cannot be in harmony with anyone or anything if the need for more, more, more is gnawing at our insides like a maggot.

What good is it to be rational at work if our personal lives are a hot-blooded series of disasters? How long can we keep the two domains separate anyway? You might rule cities or a great empire, but if you’re not in control of yourself, it is all for naught.

summum bonum

Confucius wrote that the “gentleman is self-possessed and relaxed, while the petty man is perpetually full of worry.”

The child is in me still . . . and sometimes not so still. —FRED ROGERS

“When I hate some sonofabitch,” Joseph Kennedy liked to say, “I hate him until I die.”

oh my god

Joseph Epstein’s brilliant line is: “Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.” Democritus, twenty-four hundred years before him: “An envious man pains himself as though he were an enemy.”

What will happen to me if I get what I want? How will I feel after?

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.

When Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his notebook about how to portray envy, he said that she should be shown as lean and haggard due to her state of perpetual torment. “Make her heart gnawed by a swelling serpent,” he said, “make her ride upon death because Envy never dies.”

Thomas Traherne: “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.”

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.

ENTER RELATIONSHIPS

Agree with the central conceit of this chapter, but disagree with how it is interpreted. The meaning of life IS other people, but you don't have to be in a monogamous relationship to engage with that at all, which is what all of Holiday's examples seem to imply.

The writer Philip Roth spoke proudly late in life about living alone and being responsible or committed to nothing but his own needs. He once told an interviewer that his lifestyle meant he could be always on call for his work, never having to wait for or on anyone but himself. “I’m like a doctor and it’s an emergency room,” he said. “And I’m the emergency.”

Although the Stoics are often criticized for their rigid rules and discipline, that is really what they are after: an inner dignity and propriety that protects them and their loved ones from dangerous passions.

Churchill. He was a man of great discipline and passion. He was a soldier. He was a lover of books, a believer in glory and honor. A statesman, a literal bricklayer, and a painter. We are all worms, he once joked to a friend, simple organisms that eat and defecate and then die, but he liked to think of himself as a glowworm.

Mens sana in corpore sano—a strong mind in a strong body.

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. This will take effort. Because we will not simply think our way to peace. We can’t pray our soul into better condition. We’ve got to move and live our way there. 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.

wu wei, or nonaction.

In a beautiful letter to his sister-in-law, who was often bedridden, and depressed as a result, Kierkegaard wrote of the importance of walking. “Above all,” he told her in 1847, “do not lose your desire to walk: Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”

Routine, done for long enough and done sincerely enough, becomes more than routine. It becomes ritual—it becomes sanctified and holy.

It was Eisenhower who defined freedom as the opportunity for self-discipline. In fact, freedom and power and success require self-discipline. Because without it, chaos and complacency move in. Discipline, then, is how we maintain that freedom.

The writer and runner Haruki Murakami talks about why he follows the same routine every day. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing,” he says, “it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

When our thoughts are empty and our body is in its groove, we do our best work.

The purpose of ritual isn’t to win the gods over to our side (though that can’t hurt!). It’s to settle our bodies (and our minds) down when Fortune is our opponent on the other side of the net.

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.

A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness and that to seek it is perversion. —JOHN GRAVES