The art of stillness adventures in going nowhere

#The art of stillness adventures in going nowhere how to

The Art of Stillness is a wonderful meditation on the adventures of going nowhere. Part of making better decisions is making time to think. ItвЂ™s only by stepping farther back and standing still that we can begin to see what that canvas (which is our life) really means, and to take in the larger picture. ItвЂ™s easy to feel as if weвЂ™re standing two inches away from a huge canvas thatвЂ™s noisy and crowded and changing with every microsecond. Put another way, the ability to gather information, which used to be so crucial, is now far less important than the ability to sift through it.

#The art of stillness adventures in going nowhere how to

The one thing technology doesnвЂ™t provide us with is a sense of how to make the best use of technology. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes- which means weвЂ™re never caught up with our lives.ДЄnd the more facts come streaming in on us, the less time we have to process any one of them. 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. Those were the good old days right? Pascal and Byrd didnвЂ™t have to contend with the onslaught of technology and information that we face today. Byrd declared вЂњHalf the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.вЂќ Or, as they sometimes say around Kyoto, вЂњDonвЂ™t just do something. вЂњAll the unhappiness of men,вЂќ the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal famously noted, вЂњarises from one simple fact: that they cannot sit quietly in their chamber.вЂќДЄfter spending nearly five months alone in a shack in the Antarctic where temperatures sank to minus 70, Admiral Richard E. The idea of going nowhere has been around longer than gravity. 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 IвЂ™ve seen into lasting insights.

ItвЂ™s the perspective we choose- not the places we visit-that ultimately tells us where we stand. William James said вЂњThe greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.вЂќ The best way to change our lives is to change the way we look at it. To hurry around trying to find happiness outside ourselves makes about as much sense as the comical figure in the Islamic parable who, having lost a key in his living room, goes out into the street to look for it because thereвЂ™s more light there. If your car is broken, you donвЂ™t try to find ways to repaint its chassis most of our problems- and therefore our solutions, our peace of mind- lie within.

Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus reminded us many millennia ago that itвЂ™s how we respond to our experiences, not the experiences themselves, which shape us. The idea behind choosing to sit still long enough to learn about yourself is simple and has been around for ages. вЂњThere is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.вЂќ - Shakespeare in Hamlet Going nowhere вЂ¦ isnвЂ™t about turning your back on the world itвЂ™s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply. Too many of us see going nowhere as turning away from something rather than turning towards something. He nowhere I was interested in had more corners and dimensions than I could possibly express to him (or myself), and somehow seemed larger and more unfathomable than the endlessly diverting life IвЂ™d known in the city. Our educational institutions tend to tell us the point of life is to get somewhere, not to go nowhere.

More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk. WeвЂ™ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off - our holy days, as some would have it our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. We have the sense, too often, of running at top speed and never being able to catch up.

The modern diet is a wonderful cocktail of movement and stimulation.ДЄfter a thirty-year study of time diaries, two sociologists found that Americans were actually working fewer hours than we did in the 1960s, but we feel as if weвЂ™re working more. This is largely a recipe for ensuring we will never be happy. Today weвЂ™re going faster and faster in search of contentment and meaning. The adventure of going nowhere but inside ourselves. The Art of Stillness is a persuasively argued case for the pleasures of slowing down and being in one place. вЂњSitting still,вЂќ writes Pico Iyer in The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, is вЂњa way of falling in love with the world and everything in it.вЂќ