- Pico iyer the art of stillness how to#
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In the absence of disturbances – no television, no telephone reception, no internet connection – every tolling bell seemed momentous.
Pico iyer the art of stillness windows#
I stepped, on arrival, into a room consisting of a single bed, a long desk, a chest of drawers and windows looking out on a private walled garden and the still, blue plate of the Pacific Ocean, extending in every direction, 1200ft below.
I got my own first taste of the richness and stimulation of sitting still on one of my greatest adventures, 29 years ago, when I drove to a Catholic hermitage three and a half hours from my parents’ home in California. It was through going nowhere that she made everywhere seem wondrous. Not leaving her house for 26 years brought her to such a high pitch of attention that she could see South Pole and North – and wild nights and heaven and carriage-rides with death – just by standing at her window. I think, too, of the preternatural vividness of Emily Dickinson.
Destinations can only be as rich as what we bring to them. When I travel with the Dalai Lama – as I’ve done for 10 recent Novembers across Japan – I’m convinced that the wide-awake responsiveness he brings to every last convenience store and passing toddler is partly the result of the three hours he spends at the beginning of every day in meditation. I’d much rather converse with one sight for 60 minutes than 60 places for one minute each. And we’re most at peace – ready to be transformed, in fact – when most deeply absorbed. We’re most transported when we’re least distracted. It’s also the reason so many of us try to sit on a rock in Petra before the tour buses arrive, or walk along the treeless emptiness of Iceland at 02:00 in mid-June when the sun is just beginning to sit on top of the sea. That’s one reason why, whenever I visit Midtown Manhattan, I reflexively seek out St Patrick’s Cathedral to inhale, in silence, everything I’ve just experienced and to prepare myself for the honking horns and noisy meetings to come. And I know that I as a writer will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe.It’s a relationship that has come to haunt me more and more over 46 years of travel: my capacity to be stirred is in direct proportion to my ability to be quiet. In many a piece of music, it’s the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And we all know that it’s really one of our greatest luxuries, the empty space. I pick up the Jewish holy book of the Torah its longest chapter is on the Sabbath. There’s only one word there for which the adjective “holy” is used, and that’s the Sabbath.
Pico iyer the art of stillness how to#
The one thing perhaps that technology hasn’t always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.Īnd when you speak of the Sabbath, look at the Ten Commandments.
Pico iyer the art of stillness Offline#
Like many in Silicon Valley, tries really hard to observe what they call an Internet Sabbath, whereby for 24 or 48 hours every week they go completely offline in order to gather the sense of direction and proportion they’ll need when they go online again.