Review: The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere

The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere by Pico Iyer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Notes & Key Learning

You don’t need to travel the whole world to have inner peace, happiness or some brilliant insight. As Blaise Pascal put it, you just need to find a quiet corner and be alone with yourself.
Modern technology and the deluge of information, makes it difficult for you to just detach your mind and let it just wander. E.g. It takes you 20+ minutes to refocus, after being distracted by your phone.

Writers such as Thomas Merton & Annie Dillard have given their suggestions on writing and creative processes. Which can be summarized as spending time addressing a challenge or problem, until your mind formulates a solution to it, or one appears. Like Frankl said, let it ensue, rather than pursue it. Dillard in particular, sits with a story, like with a dying friend, until the words manifest in an organic way.

It is advisable, to set up times of the day, or entire days, when you switch off the technology and the call of everyday life, and retreat back into loneliness and your thoughts.

Take a few minutes out of your day, to sit quietly and do nothing. 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.

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.

But what I discovered, almost instantly, was that as soon as I was in one place, undistracted, the world lit up and I was as happy as when I forgot about myself. Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else

Writers, our creations come not when we’re out in the world, gathering impressions, but when we’re sitting still, turning those impressions into sentences

Don’t just do something. Sit there.

“One of the strange laws of contemplative life,” Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, “is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.”

Annie Dillard, who sat still for a long time at Tinker Creek—and in many other places—has it, “I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend.”

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