The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere

By Pico Iyer

A follow up to Pico Iyer’s essay “The Joy of Quiet,” The Art of Stillness considers the unexpected adventure of staying put and reveals a counterintuitive truth: The more ways we have to connect, the more we seem desperate to unplug.

Why might a lifelong traveler like Pico Iyer, who has journeyed from Easter Island to Ethiopia, Cuba to Kathmandu, think that sitting quietly in a room might be the ultimate adventure? Because in our madly accelerating world, our lives are crowded, chaotic and noisy. There’s never been a greater need to slow down, tune out and give ourselves permission to be still.

In The Art of Stillness—a TED Books release—Iyer investigate the lives of people who have made a life seeking stillness: from Matthieu Ricard, a Frenchman with a PhD in molecular biology who left a promising scientific career to become a Tibetan monk, to revered singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, who traded the pleasures of the senses for several years of living the near-silent life of meditation as a Zen monk. Iyer also draws on his own experiences as a travel writer to explore why advances in technology are making us more likely to retreat. He reflects that this is perhaps the reason why many people—even those with no religious commitment—seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or seeking silent retreats. These aren't New Age fads so much as ways to rediscover the wisdom of an earlier age. Growing trends like observing an “Internet Sabbath”—turning off online connections from Friday night to Monday morning—highlight how increasingly desperate many of us are to unplug and bring stillness into our lives.

The Art of Stillness paints a picture of why so many—from Marcel Proust to Mahatma Gandhi to Emily Dickinson—have found richness in stillness. Ultimately, Iyer shows that, in this age of constant movement and connectedness, perhaps staying in one place is a more exciting prospect, and a greater necessity than ever before.

In 2013, Pico Iyer gave a blockbuster TED Talk. This lyrical and inspiring book expands on a new idea, offering a way forward for all those feeling affected by the frenetic pace of our modern world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster/ TED
• Release date: Nov 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781476784731

Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer is a British-born essayist and novelist long based in both California and Japan. He is the author of numerous books about crossing cultures, among them Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, and The Global Soul. An essayist for Time since 1986, he also publishes regularly in Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and many other publications across the globe.

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The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, by Pico Iyer.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Epigraph

INTRODUCTION Going Nowhere

CHAPTER 1 Passage to Nowhere

CHAPTER 2 The Charting of Stillness

CHAPTER 3 Alone in the Dark

CHAPTER 4 Stillness Where It’s Needed Most

CHAPTER 5 A Secular Sabbath

CHAPTER 6 Coming Back Home

Acknowledgments

About the Photography

About the Author

Watch Pico Iyer’s TED Talk

About TED Books

About TED

For Sonny Mehta, who has taught me, and so many others, about art, stillness, and the relation between them.

If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.

—Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz

Introduction

Going Nowhere

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 for 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 thirty 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 a bare meditation hall, sitting stock-still. His name in the monastery, Jikan, referred to the silence between two thoughts.

Reviews for The Art of Stillness

[lucaconti-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

highly recommended

[Keith Kiely · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

insightful, entertaining and wonderfully instructive. take the time to read!

[delaware3kevin · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I thought the book was just ok. I appreciated the parts about Sabbath - taking a rest. I think that is spot on correct.

[fliss88_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The bit I liked the best - “Don’t just do something. Sit there.” A TED talk in book form. I’ll be looking for more.

[benkline · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Any avid reader already knows the "art of stillness", and there is definitely something to it. That peaceful calmness of just 'being'. Ironically, I read this on a weekend (my work weekend) where I had a day of 29,000 steps, and a day where I was going from one thing to another and getting myself a head-cold in the process, and now laying in bed 'recovering' and reading.

I know personally, I have my greatest peace of mind when I'm out in the woods (walking though) or just taking a long, soothing shower. Their both (my) [a] form of meditation.

I always enjoy these little TED books whenever I find them at the library. Quick to read and digest, usually with a beautiful book design, and about something practical and interesting. This is a few short essays by Pico Iyer about Leonard Cohen being 'still' and Thomas Merton as well as the author himself and a few others. In this day and age of high paced action, it's definitely worth reading/considering.

[patl_53 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As happy as I am to see the popularity of silence and solitude for contemporary busyness, this book is like the author's TED talk: not particularly deep or engaging, long on memoir and short on application for the reader. Many better books on the subject exist, though if this book introduces solitude to the masses who go on to read more deeply and broadly, it will have been a good stepping stone.

[jonarnold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I’m a sucker for the type of books that espouse a little slowing down, that tell us we should take a little more time to stop and not only smell the flowers but admire their beauty too. Iyer advocates that what we need in our modern age of constant connection that we sometimes need to get away from the crowds of human civilisation where we can take stock and notice the beauty in things we take for granted; the god in the details if you like. This is beautifully presented too; the photos complement the underlying philosophy of the book. It’s more an introduction to the concept and the experience of stillness than a deep guide to the philosophy of slowing down but ultimately it’s a thoughtful piece that can give you directions to other, deeper explorations of the concept.

[pw0327 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The art of stillness by Pico Iyer is a short book. It is a very good book and is a part of the Ted Talk series of books. The book was so short that I was able to read it in one sitting. Not taking an hour but maybe 45 minutes.

The idea of the book is to explore the how essential silence and not doing anything is important to our psyche. The author name drop a bit talking about Celebrities and their urge to be silent , mainly about Leonard Cohen, the Dalai Lama, The writer Annie Dillard, and various others. But this is not just a laundry list of meditating celebrities, it is a little more than that. It is about trying to describe what meditation and being silent, and being away from all the so-called conveniences of modern life to do for us as well as why we need to do this for our own sanity.

Site sometimes find it ironic that book on meditation and how to relax is so pressure packed about the benefits of meditation. It is almost as though the authors were trying to put pressure on the reader to realize the errors of their by adding more pressure, kind of a counterintuitive action.

This book is simple it does a really nice job of describing what the sensation is without actually going into a how-to guide, it allows the reader to use their imagination and allows the reader to come up with their own reality of being nowhere and being silent and being unmoving.

This book has peaked my interest over some of the other tomes on meditation and it has gotten me interested in pursuing this practice.

[dazzyj_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A slight book (well, to be fair, a TED talk) in which the author writes, in a somewhat ungainly way, of fashionable topics such as mindfulness, meditation and the modern curse of busy-ness, as if he is the first person to have discovered them.

[mypennameonly · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When I began to read Pico Iyer’s “The Art of Stillness” I read it like any other book; sitting in a chair in front of my computer. However, the book didn’t seem to do anything for me as it felt like I just read a string of words, sentences and paragraphs which have been put together.

But this couldn’t be the case as the book had promised to take me somewhere or increase my knowledge. From what I’ve read about the author, I’d anticipated getting much more. If the book isn’t the problem, then the problem rested with me. Sitting totally still, the realization came to me I must change; I didn’t have to change anything about myself, I had to change the way I’d approached in reading this.

Laying on my bed in total silence, not a sound being able to distract my thoughts, and my mind a blank I began reading the book anew. This time the author’s thoughts and ideas became clear, and I began to understand this message.

“The Art of Stillness” is a wonderful way to escape reality and to take someone to places they’ve never been to physically. And if your mind is allowed to take a trip to nowhere you’ll actually wind up in a place where your mind is allowed to wander aimlessly; and once it comes back, you’ll find yourself refreshed and feeling like someone new.

Mr. Pico writing I feel talks to you in a very subtle manner, a manner in which you’ll learn a lot about things and yourself. I can’t see giving this book anything but 5 STARS.

I received a hardcover copy of this book in a giveaway on GoodReads.com and this review has been my honest opinion.

Robin Leigh Morgan is the author of “I Kissed a Ghost,” a MG/YA Paranormal romance novel.