stillness

How to make space for stillness in a world that values ever faster movement?

Today I write this with snow pouring down, the world here enveloped in white. Glad for the enforced space of a snowfall: There is nothing so quiet, nothing so perfect in its stillness.

The TED talk on the radio last weekend, heard in bits and pieces while plowing through house maintenance, was titled Quiet. I’ve been meaning to read Susan Cain’s book of the same name, about the value of introverts in today’s extrovert-valuing culture.

Pico Iyer’s piece caught the full of my attention. I stopped and listened, pulled back more than a decade to my academic research on speed and memory.

Iyer opted out of a fast-paced New York life to move to Kyoto, Japan, seeking something that was missing from what was an exciting, globe-trotting, materially comfortable existence. In Kyoto he found a clear space to sit still. And he found that sitting still was at least as exciting as traveling the globe. When I heard him say this, I sighed gratefully in recognition.

I’ve had friends visit my rural abode who’ve barely stepped out of the car when they announce they could never live so removed an existence. So isolated. So quiet. So…boring–they don’t say the last one but I know it’s there. Aren’t you lonely? What do you do for fun? I smile. Their need for movement, busyness, constant connectedness is not mine.

It’s not our experience that makes our lives, the Stoics believed, it’s what we do with it.

So many of us are racing ever faster to and fro, propelled and pulled by so many machines and media and a culture that values production and output and not taking a break. We seek to accumulate more and faster experience, but we don’t have time to process it. We don’t have time to re-collect, to assimilate meaning from the activities and busyness we so highly value. Sitting still is largely equated with wasting time.

But it is in stillness, Iyer says, that we prepare ourselves for dealing with the realities of life, which are often very difficult ones. At those critical moments of pain and loss, sudden and wrenching, it is not the daily running around or the fabulous trip to Bali that will sustain us, but the moments in which we were still.

Iyer realized that for him making a living and making a life were pointing in two different directions. And sitting still, far from removing him from his  life, was what brought him fully into it.

In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilirating than going slow. And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still.

Yes. Sitting still and stilling my mind no longer is one more thing to find time for. It’s an integral, balm-like part of my days, the truest rudder through the worst storms.