PSYCHOSCAPES: Stillness

Jenness Pond

“In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.”

― Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere

I am looking at a photo I took at the apex of summer. It is a hazy, sunny day, but dead still: no wind, not the slightest breeze. The world is in suspended animation: more like a painting than a living landscape. There’s no sense of foreboding, only a feeling of peace and serenity, a blessed escape from the jittery world of appearances, disconcerting like the flickering lines in the early TVs I watched as a kid.

Today, of course, things are different: TVs are now unblinking portals in technocolor looking out on a world gone bonkers while our own country is sinking fast under our spastic new president.

Seeking stillness is my safe harbor in the storm. But I'm a piker compared to pico Iver, the writer and world traveler who has carried it to an extreme. He and his wife moved to Tokyo to live in a tiny apartment without a bedroom or TV.

Pico recently wrote a fascinating little book about his transformation, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere^⁠1, based on his TED talk. In it, he argues that our perspective—not the places we visit—tells us where we stand.

He quotes Admiral Richard E. Byrd, who had this to say after spending five months alone in a shack in the Antarctic in temperatures that dipped to 70 degrees below zero: “Half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.”

In many ways, Pico and I are kindred souls, like the way we feel about going places: “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.”

He quotes like-minded individuals like his friend Leonard Cohen, who spent years at Buddhist retreats: “Going nowhere isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.”

Pico follows in the tradition of Joan Halifix, a well-known Buddhist anthropologist who informs us Indigenous people live this higher truth every day of their lives: “This wisdom cannot be told, but it is to be found by each of us in the direct experience of silence, stillness, solitude, simplicity…and vision.” Their wisdom is a precious resource that could help us repair our rapidly disintegrating world.^⁠2

Echoing this indigenous wisdom, the Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr considers silence to be “the very foundation of all reality. It is that out of which all being comes and to which all things return.” Unless we learn to live there, “the rest of things—words, events, relationships, identities—all become rather superficial, without depth or context.^⁠”^⁠3

I fear that the wisdom imparted by the likes of Iver, Halifax, and Rorh is too much for our driven, information-obsessed society to absorb, chattering away like a class of kindergarteners who have gorged on too much candy and soda.

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