In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. Iyer contends that the best place to visit in these frenzied, over-connected times is nowhere:Īt some point, all the horizontal trips in the world stop compensating for the need to go deep, into somewhere challenging and unexpected movement makes most sense when grounded in stillness. Going nowhere, as Cohen described it, was the grand adventure that makes sense of everywhere else.įrom the Mayhem of Thought & Action to The Stillness of Being Sitting still with his aged Japanese friend, sipping Courvoisier, and listening to the crickets deep into the night, was the closest he’d come to finding lasting happiness, the kind that doesn’t change even when life throws up one of its regular challenges and disruptions. But the words carried weight when coming from one who seemed to have tasted all the pleasures that the world has to offer. Typically lofty and pitiless words living on such close terms with silence clearly hadn’t diminished his gift for golden sentences. The real feast that is available within this activity.” … “This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence.” “Real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment. … Sitting still, he said with unexpected passion, was “the real deep entertainment” he had found in his sixty-one years on the planet. The week I was visiting, he was essentially spending seven days and nights in a bare meditation hall, sitting stock-still. And he was working on simplifying himself as fiercely as he might on the verses of one of his songs, which he spends more than ten years polishing to perfection. Leonard Cohen had come to this Old World redoubt to make a life-an art-out of stillness. Baldy Zen Center in California, embarked on five years of seclusion, served as an aide to the now-107-year-old Japanese Zen teacher Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, and got ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk. In 1994, after constant indulgence as an incessant traveler and international heartthrob, Cohen moved to the Mt. Iyer gives us glimpses into the lives of a privileged few who have found peace.įor example, legendary singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen discovered the supreme seduction of a monastic life. Subtitled “Adventures in Going Nowhere,” Iyer’s insightful 64-page book provides several examples of stillness in practice. The Importance of Taking a Timeout From Busyness In the age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still. I find that the best way I could develop more attentive and more appreciative eyes was, oddly to go nowhere … just by sitting still. One of the first things you learn when you travel is that nowhere is magical unless you can bring the right eyes to it. It’s only by stepping back and holding still, that we can begin to see what the canvass means. Many of us have the sensation that we are standing about two inches away from a huge canvass. We all know that in our undermined lives, one of the things most undermined is ourselves. The book’s promo includes excerpts from Iyer’s talk: Pico Iyer and his family lives in a modest home in the countryside near Kyoto without internet, television, mobile phones, or even cars. Iyer makes a persuasive argument for the startling pleasures of “sitting still as a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it.” Stillness: “Clarity and Sanity and the Joys that Endure”Ĭelebrated globetrotter and travel writer Pico Iyer’s “The Art of Stillness,” an expansion of his TED talk, is an inspiring analysis of the need to escape the persistent distractibility of the mundane. When we remain still, we are struck by the realization that our noisy outer world is nothing but a reflection of our cluttered inner world. To counter all of our exhilarating movement, we must balance it with an escape.
#THE ART OF STILLNESS OPRAH HOW TO#
The French scientist and Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in Pensees, “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries, and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries” and added that “the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” We hardly ever pause to contemplate our experiences or reflect on the life we’ve been missing in a world overwhelmed by distractions.ĭistractions disrupt our peace. We cannot afford some space to think and just be. Often, our identities are defined by mere ‘doing,’ not ‘being.’ Many of us struggle to find a few minutes to just sit quietly and clear our heads. We have an incessant need to be occupied.
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