Finding the time and inclination to be still is a challenge, and when we do sit still, we often find that the mind is incredibly restless.
Lao Tzu wrote something similar in the Tao Te Ching more than 2000 years ago: “Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?” By stepping off the treadmill of modern life for a moment, we receive the gift of clarity.įor many of us, however, this state is not so easy to achieve, and it takes a while for us to settle. In his book The Sun My Heart, Thich Nhat Hanh uses the metaphor of a glass of cloudy apple juice which, once poured, needs time for the sediment to settle before the juice is clear. It’s when we’re in this balanced state that we’re able to access our inner wisdom and deepest insights. True stillness means coming into a state of sattva. Many of us spend our days oscillating between tamas and rajas: we drink coffee and race around during the daytime and then retreat to the couch to eat heavy foods, drink wine and watch Netflix at night, for example. Tamas is associated with ignorance, staleness, heaviness and stagnation rajas with hyperactivity and sattva with a state of equanimous calm and awareness.
In yogic theory, there are three gunas, or qualities at play in the universe: tamas, rajas and sattva. Yet stillness isn’t just the opposite of movement: its true meaning is much deeper. In a culture like ours, the opposite of movement can seem unhealthy or even threatening. In our work lives, we’re often expected to be doing more than one thing at a time, and our ability to multitask has become something to brag about. We live in a culture that is very much obsessed with the idea of movement: with growth, with progress, with advancing in a forward direction. He declares that, “he very people, in short, who have worked to speed up the world are the same ones most sensitive to the virtue of slowing down.” Yet the prophets of his book are not primarily giants of Silicon Valley they are figures like Thoreau and Dickinson, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, not Sergey Brin and Larry Page.We explore the benefits of finding stillness in a world that won’t stop moving.
His praise of people who work in that industry, for instance, feels more like flattery than analysis. Iyer strangely, and unnecessarily, seems to feel the need to a give a nod to the series’ tech roots.
The fact that he has traveled to some of the world’s most obscure corners only strengthens his credibility as a defender of stillness.Īt points, however, it appears the book’s origins as a TED talk slightly weaken the cogency of the argument. The first line of a famous Dickinson poem Iyer quotes offers a nice summation: “The Brain - is wider than the Sky.” Iyer uses a fluid blend of argument and anecdote to make a persuasive and eloquent case that contemplating internal landscapes can be just as rich an experience as traveling through external ones. And yet almost any page of Proust or poem of Dickinson refutes the idea that sitting quietly in a room must be an exercise in dullness. Both figures lived relatively cloistered lives. Iyer also dips into the lives and works of such authors as Proust and Emily Dickinson to bolster his case.
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