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The Art of Stillness, by Pico Iyer
“So much of our lives takes place in our heads – in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation – that sometimes I feel 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. “ –Pico Iyer, from The Art of Stillness
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In today’s episode I’ll read a few passages from Pico Iyer’s short and beautiful book entitled The Art of Stillness – Adventures in going nowhere. This small, 74-page book has made a big impact on my thinking and behavior, and I keep it handy to pick up and read when I’m feeling especially fragmented or frazzled.
I hope you enjoy it.
In the introduction…
…The sun was scattering diamonds across the ocean as I drove toward the deserts of the east. Leonard Cohen, my hero since boyhood, was singing so long to Marianne on my sound system when I turned onto the snarl of freeways that clog and clutter central Los Angeles. The sharp winter sun disappeared behind a wall of gray for more than an hour, and then at last I drew out again into the clear.
Turning off the freeway, I followed a riddle of side streets onto a narrower road, all but empty, that snaked up into the high, dark, San Gabriel Mountains. Very soon all commotion fell away. Los Angeles simplified itself into a silhouette of peaks in the distance.
High up – signs prohibiting the throwing of snowballs now appeared along the road – I came to a cluster of rough cabins scattered across a hillside. A small man in his sixties, stooped and shaven headed, stood waiting for me in a rough parking lot. As soon as I got out of my car, he offered a deep ceremonial bow – though we’d never met before – and insisted on carrying my things into the cabin where I was to stay for the next many days. His dark and threadbare monastic robes flew around him in the wind.
Once inside the shelter of the room, the monk started cutting up some freshly baked bread, to console me from my “long drive.” He put on a kettle for tea. He told me he had a wife for me if I wanted one. (I didn’t; I had one on the way.)
I’d come up here in order to write about my host’s near-silent, anonymous life on the mountain, but for the moment I lost all sense of where I was. I could hardly believe that this rabbinical-seeming gentleman in wire-rimmed glasses and wool cap was in truth the singer and poet who’d been renowned for 30 years as an international heartthrob, a constant traveler, and an Armani-clad man of the world.
Leonard Cohen had come to this Old-World redoubt to make a life – an art – out of stillness. 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. The week I was visiting, he was essentially spending seven days and nights in bare meditation hall, sitting stock-still. His name in the monastery, Jikan, referred to the silence between two thoughts.
Being in this remote place of stillness had nothing to do with piety or purity, he assured me; it was simply the most practical way he’d found of working through the confusion and terror that had long been his bedfellows. 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.
“Nothing touches it,” Cohen said…then gave me a crooked smile. “Except if you’re courtin’, he added. If you’re young, the hormonal thrust has its’ own excitement.
From Chapter 1: (P5)
As Cohen talked about the art of sitting still (In other words, clearing the head and stilling the emotions) – 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 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 a 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.
And…
With machines coming to seem part of our nervous systems, while increasing their speed every season, we’ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off – our holy days, as some would have it, our bosses, junk mailers, parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. More and more of us feel like emergency room physicians permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.
In Chapter 4, entitled Stillness Where It’s Needed Most, Iyer relates the following:
One spring morning, I heard a knock on my door in the monastery that had become my secret home…and opened it up to find two young friends I’d never met before but had come to know a little through correspondence. Emma was the associate director of a research center at Stanford, and her fiancé (now husband), Andrew, was a Marine. We walked down to a small bench overlooking the blue expanse of the Pacific – no islands in front of us, no oil rigs, no whales – and Emma explained how, as a postdoc in Wisconsin, she’d spent a year raising money to fund a study to see if military veterans facing the possibility of post traumatic stress disorder could be helped by some training in stillness.
The guys who came into her lab, she said, were – as I would expect – hard-drinking, tattoo covered, motorbike riding Midwestern men who had no interest at all in what they called “hippie dipshit.” As far as they were concerned, she was the one being tested, not they. But then she put ten of them through a weeklong yoga-based breathing program. And when they came out of the 25-hour course in going nowhere, the veterans reported significant decreases in symptoms of stress, feelings of anxiety, and even respiration rate. The ten who didn’t receive the training were un-changed…Her paper describing the pilot study had been peer reviewed and accepted by the Journal of Traumatic Stress.
Then Andrew spoke. He remained where he was, straight backed and alert, standing beside the bench on which Emma and I were sitting, and began by confessing, with a polite smile, that meditation practice was never going to be an easy sell in the “alpha-male, hypermacho” world of the Marine Corps. In fact, when he’d embarked upon his own very strict forty-day program in sitting still, “I was more out to prove it wrong, or just be my disciplined Marine self and see the mission through.” But soon, to his surprise, he found his hours of concentrated attention were making him unusually happy, to the point where he began to worry he was losing his edge.
His adviser assured him that he was no less alert than before, just more selective about the potential threats or targets to respond to. “Which allowed me”, Andrew went on, “to ignore many of the things I would normally pay attention to and to enjoy daily life more instead.” He was amazed, as a hard-charging Marine Corps Scout sniper, “that something so soft could also make me so much harder as a Marine.”
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The Impact
These are just a few of the passages you’ll find. Within this beautifully written, brief book are contained many thoughts about stillness. About opening up to the idea of its benefits, about the courage it can take to turn inward. About desire and resilience and slowing down. The impact it has made on my day-to day life has allowed me to approach my life differently – to create more space in each day and allow a presence in the moment that was not available to me before. This too, is a Workbench Tool that can be developed and put to use.
I hope you enjoyed this episode! Tune in next time for a conversation with Rick Whipps, in which we talk music, career change, growing up in a small town, and much more!
Resources:
Book: The Art of Stillness – Adventures in Going Nowhere by Pico Iyer. (Consider supporting your local bookstore!)
Photo by Karen Baker (Thank you Mom!)
Song for the Workbench Playlist: Somewhere Down the Crazy River by Robbie Robertson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KP9PNSUME4