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Learning to enjoy living

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

PICO Iyer is a travel writer and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, Time, and other magazines. His is a lifestyle determined by deadlines and the rigours of travelling for work. “I’m not a member of any church, and I don’t subscribe to any creed; I’ve never been a member of any meditation or yoga group,” he disclaims.

The title of the book, The Art of Stillness, is a call to use stillness in a world he accurately describes as “madly accelerating”. If you have any doubts about this description, try to recall when last you had nights off, or did no work at all on the weekend. (Reading business literature does qualify as work.)

To get the most benefit from this book, you should read it slowly and thoughtfully. It is a slim tome on an important topic, best appreciated while unwinding on holiday.

“More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call,” says Iyer. We have mastered so many parts of our lives in the last half century, except how to enjoy living. Geography is fast coming under our control; we send messages around the world in seconds, parcels in hours and can talk to people anywhere easily and inexpensively. However, the clock seems to be “exerting more and more tyranny over us”.

Iyer advocates regular periods of stillness, daily if possible. Times when we take a journey to “Nothing.” It is a short period when we retreat from our busy-ness, “so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply”.

In the second century, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius pointed out that it is not our experiences that form us, but the way we understand them and respond to them. Being still puts distance between our present and our experience, so we can view experiences with “clarity and sanity” and reap the benefits that come from that.

The opportunity to distance ourselves helps experiences acquire the appropriate importance. All it involves is sitting still; nothing more.

Iyer reports that in his work world “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”.

When he attended retreat centres he met bankers, teachers, real estate agents, people leading normal business lives who came to the centres, just to be still for a few days.

Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wire magazine, is certainly one of the most articulate representatives for the technologies of our time. His wrote his latest book on the uses of technology to expand human potential while living without a smartphone, a laptop or a TV in his home. He explains that he keeps “the cornucopia of technology at arm’s length so that I can more easily remember who I am”.

Many in Silicon Valley observe what Iyer calls an “Internet Sabbath”, turning off their devices from Friday evening to Monday morning. It is telling that people who do so much to speed up the world see the benefit of slowing down regularly.

General Mills, a company with revenues of almost $14bn, offered a seven-week programme to senior executive on “stillness”. Of these, 80% reported a positive improvement in their ability to make decisions and 89% that they were becoming better listeners. It is estimated that programmes like this save American businesses $300bn a year!

The most telling report Iyer relays is a Stanford peer-reviewed study of the effect of stillness on military veterans. The author’s husband, a Marine Corps Scout Sniper, undertook a 40-day personal trial to see if he had similar results. He reported that his hours of concentrated attention left him unusually happy, worrying him that he was softening.

His adviser assured him that he was still hyper-alert -only more selective about the “potential threats or targets to respond to”. He reported his surprise that “something so soft could also make me so much harder as a Marine".

On a flight from Frankfurt to Los Angeles, Iyer was seated next to a woman who, after a few pleasantries, sat in silence, doing nothing, for the next 12 hours. At the end of the journey, she explained that her job was exhausting and that she was beginning five weeks of vacation in Hawaii. She was using the flight to get rid of the stress, ready for her days of rest. Nothing for 12 hours - no reading, no watching movies, nothing.

We are living in an age of constant movement that makes being still so much more urgent.

The Art of Stillness is an important holiday read. Iyer offers the following summary advice: “Don’t just do something. Sit there.”

Readability       Light +--- Serious
Insights         High +---- Low
Practical        High ----+ Low

*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of Strategy that Works. Views expressed are his own.

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