The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere by Pico Iyer.
Title: The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere.
Author: Pico Iyer.
Genre: Non-fiction, meditation, philosophy.
Country: London, U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2014.
Summary: An unexpected truth from a celebrated travel writer: Stillness just might be the ultimate adventure. The author has spent his life traveling the world-from Eastern Island to Ethiopia, Cuba to Kathmandu-and writing about his travels. In this book, he counterintuitively makes a case for the pleasures of stillness. Drawing on the lives of Leonard Cohen and Mahatma Gandhi, Marcel Proust and Emily Dickinson, he reveals how stillness can quicken creativity, and opens up a way of living that counters the mad rush of our modern lives. In a world beset by the distractions and demands of technology, Iyer reflects on why so many seem desperate to unplug. The tonic, he suggests, is the age-old practice of slowing down, taking stock, and discoveeing the simple, cathartic thrill of stillness.
My rating: 8.5/10
My review:
♥ One evening-four in the morning, the end of December-Cohen took time out from his meditations to walk down to my cabin and try to explain what he was doing here.
Sitting still, he said with unexpected passion, was "the real deep entertainment" he had found in his sixty-one years on the planet. "Real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment. The real feast that is available within this activity."
Was he kidding? Cohen is famous for his mischief sand ironies.
He wasn't, I realized as he went on. "What else would I be doing?" he asked. "Would I be starting a new marriage with a young woman and raising another family? Finding new drugs, buying more expensive wine? I don't know. This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence."
Typically lofty and pitiless words; living on such close terms with silence clearly hadn't diminished his gift for golden sentences. But the words carried weight when coming from one who seemed to have tasted all the pleasures that the world has to offer.
..Going nowhere, as Cohen described it, was the grand adventure that makes sense of everywhere else.
♥ Yet, as Cohen talked about the art of sitting still (in other words, clearing the head and stilling the motions)-and as I observed the sense of attention, kindness, and even delight that seemed to arise out of his life of going nowhere-I began to think about how liberating it might be for any of us to give it a try. One could start just by taking a few minutes out of every day to sit quietly and do nothing, letting what moves one rise to the surface. One could take a few days out of every season to go on retreat or enjoy a long walk in the wilderness, recalling what lies deeper than the moment or the self. One could even, as Cohen was doing, try to find a life in which stage sets and performances disappear and one is reminded, at a level deeper than all words, how making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.
♥ As I came down from the mountain, I recalled how, not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it's often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources-it's a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources. Going nowhere, as Cohen had shown me, is not about austerity so much as about coming closer to one's senses.
♥ But I'd been reminded on the mountain that talking about stillness is really a way of talking about clarity and sanity and the joys that endure. Take this book, about these unexpected pleasures, as an invitation to the adventure of going nowhere.
~~from Introduction: Going Nowhere.
♥ When I was twenty-nine, I had the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a twenty-fifth-floor office in Midtown Manhattan, four blocks from Times Square; an apartment on Park Avenue and Twentieth Street; the most interesting and convivial colleagues I could imagine; and an endlessly fascinating job writing about world affairs-the ending of apartheid on South Africa, the People Power Revolution in the Philippines, the turmoil around Indira Gandhi's assassination-for Time magazine.
..For all the daily excitement, however, something inside me felt that I was racing around so much that I never had a chance to see where I was going, or to check whether I was truly happy. Indeed, hurrying around in search of contentment seemed a perfect way of ensuring I'd never be settled or content. Too often I reminded myself of someone going on and on about world peace in the most contentious and divisive terms.
♥ As soon as I left the security of my job and plunged into the unknown, my father began calling me up, unsurprisingly concerned, to berate me for being a "pseudoretiree." I couldn't blame him; all the institutions of higher skepticism to which he'd so generously sent me had insisted that the point of life was to get somewhere in the world, not to go nowhere. But the nowhere I was interested in had more corners and dimensions than I could possibly express to him (or myself), and somehow seemed larger and more unfathomable than the endlessly diverting life I'd known in the city; it opened onto a landscape as vast as those of the Morocco and Indonesia and Brazil I had come to know, combined.
♥ Going nowhere, as Leonard Cohen would later emphasize for me, isn't about turning your back on the world; it's about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.
♥ So much of our lives takes place in our heads-in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation-that sometimes I feel that I can best change my life by changing the way I look at it. As America's wisest psychologist, William James, reminded us, "The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another." It's the perspective we choose-not the places we visit-that ultimately tells us where we stand. Every time I take a trip, the experience acquires meaning and grows deeper only after I get back home and, sitting still, begin to convert the sights I've seen into lasting insights.
♥ But at some point all the horizontal trips in the world can't compensate for the need to go deep into somewhere challenging and unexpected. Movement makes richest sense when set within a frame of stillness.
♥ But what I discovered, almost instantly, was that as soon as I was in one place, undistracted, the world lit up and I was as happy as when I forgot about myself. Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else.
♥ When I drove back into my day-to-day existence, I felt the liberation of not needing to take my thoughts, my ambitions-my self-so seriously.
This small taste of silence was so radical and so unlike most of what I normally felt..
♥ This isn't everyone's notion of delight; maybe you have to taste quite a few of the alternatives to see the point in stillness. But when friends ask me for suggestions about where to go on vacation, I'll sometimes ask if they want to try Nowhere, especially if they don't want to have to deal with visas and injections and long lines at the airport. One of the beauties of nowhere is that you never know where you'll end up when you head in its direction, and though the horizon is unlimited, you may have very little sense of what you'll see along the way. The deeper blessing-as Leonard Cohen had so movingly shown me, sitting still-is that it can get you as wide-awake, exhilarated, and pumping-hearted as when you are in love.
♥ Writers, of course, are obliged by our professions to spend much of our time going nowhere. Our creations come not when we're out in the world, gathering impressions, but when we're sitting still, turning those impressions into sentences. Our job, you could say, is to turn, through stillness, a life of movement into art. Sitting still is our workplace, sometimes our battlefield.
♥ The experience that lasted an instant plays out for a lifetime inside us. It becomes, in fact, the story of our lives.
♥ But, like many a wanderer, he seemed always to know that it's only when you stop moving that you can be moved in some far deeper way ("Now I know why many men have stopped and wept," he writes in an early poem, "Halfway between the loves they leave and seek, / And wondered if travel leads them anywhere").
Whenever he took his pulse most directly, he tended to acknowledge that his greatest journeys were inner ones. "I needed so much to have nothing to touch," he confesses in one typically unflinching song about going to the Zen Center. "I've always been greedy that way."
♥ When I paged through the book, I realized Matthieu had inherited his mother's eye for the art of stillness as well as his father's analytical mind; these Portraits of Nowhere, as they could have been called, were magical. I saw Indonesia and Peru, sunlit valleys and storm-blackened skies in his work; it felt as if most of the world had made a house call to his cabin. The book, which he called Motionless Journey, might almost have been an investigation into how everything changes and doesn't change at all-how the same place looks different even as you're not really going anywhere.
But what made it most haunting was that, at heart, it was a description of an inner landscape. This is what your mind-your life-looks like when you're going nowhere. Always full of new colors, sights, and beauties; always, more or less, unaltered.
♥ None of us, of course, would want to be in a Nowhere we hadn't chosen, as prisoners or invalids are. Whenever I travel to North Korea or Yemen-to any of the world's closed or impoverished places-I see how almost anyone born to them would long to be anywhere else, and to visit other countries with the freedom that some of the rest of us enjoy. From San Quentin to New Delhi, the incarcerated are taught meditation, but only so they can see that within their confinement there may be spots of liberation. Otherwise, those in solitary may find themselves bombarded by the terrors and unearthly visitations that Emily Dickinson knew in her "still-Volcano-Life."
♥ [Emily Dickinson] could feel Death calling for her in her bed, she wrote, as she plumbed the shadows within the stillness; again and again she imagined herself posthumous, mourners "treading-treading" in her brain. She knew that you do not have to be a chamber to be haunted, that "Ourself behind ourself concealed- / Should startle most." Her unsettling words brought to mind poor Herman Melville, conjuring up at the same time his own version of a motionless ghost, Bartleby, a well-spoken corpse conducting a makeshift Occupy Wall Street resistance by sitting in a lawyer's office in lower Manhattan, "preferring" not to go anywhere.
Nowhere can be scary, even if it's a destination you've chosen; there's nowhere to hide there. Being locked inside your head can drive you mad or leave you with a devil who tells you to stay at home and stay at home till you are so trapped inside your thoughts that you can't step out or summon the power of intention.
A life of stillness can sometimes lead not to art but to doubt or dereliction; anyone who longs to see the light is signing on for many long nights alone in the dark. Visiting a monastery, I also realized how easy it might be to go there as an escape, or in the throes of an infatuation certain not to last. As in any love affair, the early days of a romance with stillness give little sign of the hard work to come.
♥ This was all a bit paradoxical-as hard to disentangle as a Zen koan-but I could catch the fundamental point: a man sitting still is alone, often, with the memory of all he doesn't have. And what he does have can look very much like nothing.
♥ Just one year before meeting "M.," ecstatic in his new hermitage, Merton had written, "I had decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife." That, too, seemed to have changed, like the skies in Matthieu Ricard's photos. You don't get over the shadows inside you simply by walking away from them.
♥ And the more facts come streaming in on us, the less time we have to process any one of them. The one thing technology doesn't provide us with is a sense of how to make the best use of technology. Put another way, the ability to gather information, which used to be so crucial, is now far less important than the ability to sift through it.
It's easy to feel as if we're standing two inches away from a huge canvas that's noisy and crowded and changing with every microsecond. It's only by stepping farther back and standing still that we can begin to see what that canvas (which is our life) really means, and to take in the larger picture.
♥ Many in Silicon Valley observe an "Internet Sabbath" every week, during which they turn off most of their devices from, say, Friday night to Monday morning, if only to regather the sense of proportion and direction they'll need for when they go back online. I was reminded of this by Kevin Kelly, one of the most passionate spokesmen for new technologies (and the founding executive editor of Wired magazine), who had written his latest book about how technology can "expand our individual potential" while living without a smartphone, a laptop, or a TV in his home. Kevin still takes off on months-long trips through Asian villages without a computer, so as to be rooted in the nonvirtual world. "I continue to keep the cornucopia of technology at arm's length," he writes, "so that I can more easily remember who I am."
♥ Indeed, fully a third of American companies now have "stress-reduction programs," and the number is increasing by the day-in part because workers find unclogging their minds' arteries to be so exhilarating. More than 30 percent of those enrolled in such a program at Aetna, the giant health-care company, saw their levels of stress dropping by a third after only an hour of yoga each week. The computer chip maker Intel experimented with a "Quiet Period" of four hours every Tuesday, during which three hundred engineers and managers were asked to turn off their e-mail and phones and put up "Do Not Disturb" signs on their office doors in order to make space for "thinking time." The response proved so enthusiastic that the company inaugurated an eight-week program to encourage clearer thinking. At General Mills, 80 percent of senior executives reported a positive change in their ability to make decisions, and 89 percent said that they had become better listeners, after a similar seven-week program. Such developments are saving American corporations three hundred billion dollars a year; more important, they're a form of preemptive medicine at a time when the World Health Organization has been widely quoted as stating that "stress will be the health epidemic of the twenty-first century."
♥ To me, the point of sitting still is that it helps you see through the very idea of pushing forward; indeed, it strips you of yourself, as of a coat of armor, by leading you into a place where you're defined by something larger. If it does have benefits, they lie within some invisible account with a high interest rate but very long-term yields, to be drawn upon at that moment, surely inevitable, when a doctor walks into your room, shaking his head, or another car veers in front of yours, and all you have to draw upon is what you've collected in your deeper moments. But there's no questioning the need for clarity and focus, especially when the stakes are highest.
♥ No one could say it was a panacea, and I have never been one for New Age ideas. It was the ideas of old age-or at least of those whose thoughts had stood the test of time for centuries, even millennia-that carried more authority for me. But twenty-two veterans are taking their own lives around us every day, and their average age is twenty-five. It doesn't seem crazy to think that training minds might help save lives at least as much as training bodies does.
♥ The need for an empty space, a pause, is something we have all felt in our bones; it's the rest in a piece of music that gives it resonance and shape. That's the reason American football players prefer to go into a huddle rather than just race toward the line of scrimmage, the reason a certain kind of writer will include as lot of blank space on a page, so his sentences have room to breathe (and his readers, too).
♥ The one word for which the adjective "holy" is used in the Ten Commandments is Sabbath.
In the book of Numbers, God actually condemns to death a man found collecting wood on the Sabbath. The book on the Sabbath is the longest one in the Torah, as Judith Shulevitz explains in her fine work, The Sabbath World. Another part of the Torah, dealing with the Sabbath's boundaries, takes up 105 pages more.
..The Sabbath recalls to us that, in the end, all our journeys have to bring us home. And we do not have to travel far to get away from our less considered habits. The places that move us most deeply, as I found in the monastery, are often the ones we recognize like long-lost friends; we come to them with a piercing sense of familiarity, as if returning to some source we already know. "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church-" Emily Dickinson wrote. "I keep it, staying at Home."
♥ Some people, if they can afford it, try to acquire a place in the country or a second home; I've always thought it easier to make a second house in the week-especially if, like most of us, you lack the funds for expensive real estate. These days, in the age of movement and connection, space, as Marx had it in another context, has been annihilated by time; we feel as though we can make contact with almost anywhere at any moment. But as fast as geography is coming under our control, the clock is exerting more and more tyranny over us. And the more we can contact others, the more, it sometimes seems, we lost contact with ourselves. When I left New York City for the backstreets of Japan, I figured I'd be growing poorer in terms of money, amusements, social life, and obvious prospects, but I'd be richer in what I prize most: days and hours.
♥ But the next time I was flying home-from New York to California-I tried to take a page out of my former seatmate's near-empty book. I didn't turn on my monitor. I didn't race through a novel. I didn't even consciously try to do nothing: when an idea came to me or I recalled something I had to do back home, I pulled out a notebook and scribbled it down. The rest of the time, I just let my mind go foraging-or lie down-like a dog on a wide, empty bench.
It was three a.m. on the wristwatch I hadn't reset when I arrived home, but I felt as clear and refreshed as when, in the hour before sleeping, I choose not to scroll through YouTube or pick up a book but simply turn off all the lights and let some music wash over me. When I awoke the next morning, I felt as new as the world I looked out upon.
♥ I think of the time when I was on a boat in the Pacific and a biologist set up a device that allowed us to hear what was going on beneath us. Under the still blue waters, it turned out, was an uproar as scratchily cacophonous as Grand Central Station at rush hour. Stillness has nothing to do with settledness or stasis.
"One of the strange laws of the contemplative life," Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, "is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you." Or, as Annie Dillard, who sat still for a long time at Tinker Creek-and in many other places-has it, "I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend."
♥ It takes courage, of course, to step out of the fray, as it takes courage to do anything that's necessary, whether tending to a loved one on her deathbed or turning away from that sugarcoated doughnut. And with billions of our global neighbors in crying need, with so much in every life that has to be done, it can sound selfish to take a break or go off to a quiet place. But as soon as you do sit still, you find that it actually brings you closer to others, in both understanding and sympathy. As the meditative video artist Bill Viola notes, it's the man who steps away from the world whose sleeve is wet with tears for it.
In any case, few of us have the chance to step out of our daily lives often, or for very long; Nowhere has to become somewhere we visit in the corners of our lives by taking a daily run or going fishing or just sitting quietly for thirty minutes every morning (a mere 3 percent of our waking hours). The point of gathering stillness is not to enrich the sanctuary or mountaintop but to bring that calm into the motion, the commotion of the world.
Indeed, Nowhere can itself often become a routine, a treadmill, the opposite of something living, if you don't see it as a way station..
♥ One day I woke up in a hotel in the LA Live entertainment zone, a glittery new complex of singles bars and megascreens, high-rising towers and a concert hall. I went downstairs to collect my morning Awake tea and heard, from the album being featured in the coffeehouse that week, a seventy-seven-year-old Zen monk croaking about "going home" to a place that sounded very much like death.
Old Ideas, rather astonishingly, had gone to the top of the charts already in seventeen countries and hit the Top Five in nine others. The singer's cold and broken "Hallelujah" had recently occupied the number one, number two, and number thirty-six spots in the British Top 40 simultaneously and become the fastest-selling download in European history. Long past what looked like retirement age, Leonard Cohen had suddenly become the latest thing, the prince of fashion, once again.
Why were people across the planet reaching out for such a funereal album with such an antitopical title? I wondered. Maybe they were finding a clarity and wisdom in the words of someone who'd gone nowhere, sitting still to look at the truth of the world and himself, that they didn't get from many other recording artists? Cohen seemed to be bringing us bulletins from somewhere more rooted than the CNN newsroom, and to be talking to us, as the best friends do, without varnish or evasion or design. And why were so many hastening to concerts delivered by a monk in his late seventies? Perhaps they longed to be taken back to a place of trust-which is what Nowhere is, at heart-where they could speak and listen with something deeper than their social selves and be returned to a penetrating intimacy.
♥ In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow.
In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.
And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.
You can go on vacation to Paris or Hawaii or New Orleans three months from now, and you'll have a tremendous time, I'm sure. But if you want to come back feeling new-alive and full of fresh hope and in love with the world-I think the place to visit may be Nowhere.