In this age of constant movement and connectedness, when so many of us are all over the place, perhaps staying in one place - and locating. Part of the TED series: The Art of Stillness. Simon & Schuster UK, Social Science - 96 pages. In fact, his personal website is a testament to that.The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere. Despite his passion for travel, he has found great beauty and meaning in stillness. In the book, Iyer shines a light on a fascinating phenomenon: how advances in technology are making us more likely to seek out spaces to retreat.In a book about “Adventures in Going Nowhere” (the book’s subtitle), it’s either ironic or perfectly fitting, that the author is Pico Iyer, an internationally known travel writer.
Pico Iyer The Art Of Stillness Youtube Full Exploitation Of
It’s a peculiar way to start a book about stillness, until you learn that Cohen—in his sixties at the time the book was published—had been adhering to a life of monastic rigidity for the past thirty years.Cohen’s explanation of the drastic change in lifestyle (through the words of Iyer): “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.”“ Going nowhere the grand adventure that makes sense of everywhere else.” – Iyer paraphrasing Cohen.Iyer and Cohen continue in their mountain-top discussion, astutely noting that “making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.”“Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources—it’s a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources.”“ alking about stillness is really a way of talking about clarity and sanity and the joys that endure.”Iyer gives a brief account of his personal path to stillness—or, as he puts it, his passage to Nowhere. Yes, the famous musician known for his wordsmithery, good looks and full exploitation of the rockstar lifestyle. His latest.He explores “Nowhere”—its soft language, deep tradition, and sometimes frighteningly lonely customs.I’ve compiled some significant quotes from The Art of Stillness, with brief explanatory notes throughout. All quotes are organized under the same titles as are in the book.Iyer opens the book with a trip up to a monastery in the mountains where he meets Leonard Cohen.
The incredible fluctuation of the “same” scenery gives way to a settled sense of awe.“The book, which 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. We observe the variation that clouds, wind, rain and light brings to a landscape. We note the shift between soft morning rays to sharp afternoon shadows to somber evening darkness. Movement makes richest sense when set within a frame of stillness.”“Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else.”“…finding what feels like real life, that changeless and inarguable something behind all our shifting thoughts, is less a discovery than a recollection.”“One of the beauties of Nowhere is that you never know where you’ll end up when you head in its direction.”He invokes the beauty and artistry of silence when he reflects on his own profession of writing: “Our creations come not when we’re out in the world, gathering impressions, but when we’re sitting still, turning those impressions into sentences.”“Sitting still is our workplace, sometimes our battlefield.”He continues on in the same vein by sharing what he calls “Portraits of Nowhere,” a work by Matthieu Ricard, a French monk whom many deem to be the happiest man in the world.Sometime before they met, Ricard had retreated to a cabin in Nepal (once again, on the top of a mountain) and over the course of a year took photos once or twice a week from the front door of his mountain retreat.In the same location, we watch as fall gives way to winter which melts into spring which welcomes summer. However, despite that initial aim, he finds that “the nowhere I was interested in had more corners and dimensions than I could possible express to (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.”He then decides to leave New York and spend a year in Kyoto, Japan in a small, single room apartment.“Going nowhere…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.”“Most of our problems—and therefore our solutions, our peace of mind—lie within.”“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.”“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.
He suggests extra attention on this subject of stillness in a time when we desperately need it.“Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from a phone call. For neither can be found unless it is first in some sense renounced.’” – Iyer quoting Thomas MertonChapter 4: Stillness Where It’s Needed MostIyer reflects on the increasing pace of the modern world and how much has changed since the days of ancient philosophers and wisdom teachers. They have external forces forbidding them to move or travel.He also talks about the dark side of stillness—what comes when you’re unprepared for what’s within.“Nowhere can be scary, even if it’s a destination you’ve chosen there’s nowhere to hide there.”Speaking of Emily Dickinson, known for rarely leaving her home: “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.”He also warns those tempted to use stillness (like that of a monastery) as an escape: “As in any love affair, the early days of a romance with stillness give little sign of the hard work to come.”“One of the laws of sitting still, in fact, is that ‘if you enter it with the set purpose of seeking contemplation, or, worse still, happiness, you will find neither. There is a suffocating nature to being Nowhere if not chosen freely, as is the case with prisoners or the disabled, or those in extreme poverty or under controlling regimes.
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