Pockets of Stillness - a discipline for busy lives
Pico Iyer – British essayist, now living in Japan - writes extensively on Stillness. Since many of us lead lives at a thousand miles an hour, and are simultaneously constantly connected to electronics, distracted by incoming calls, messages, email and junk mail. In this chaotic time, the greatest luxury for many of us is the ability to go nowhere, do nothing, and experience pockets of stillness. A brief background on Pico Iyer gives us an insight into his perspective of looking at institutions, establishments or society from the inside out.
Despite his Indian heritage and knowing the 14th Dalai Lama since he was a teenager in the 1970's, Iyer says he does not have a formal meditation practice, but practices regular solitude, visiting a remote Benedictine hermitage near Big Sur several times a year.
Pico Iyer was born Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer in Oxford, England, the son of Indian parents. His father was an Oxford philosopher and political theorist. His mother a religious scholar. His unusual name is a combination of the Buddha's name, Siddhartha, that of the Florentine neo-Platonist Pico della Mirandola and his father's name. His family moved to California when his father taught there at the university, and he spent most of his younger years moving between England and the USA. He was a King's Scholar at Eton College, and received his second master's in literature at Harvard.
Pico Iyer has lived in Japan since 1992, where he lives with his Japanese wife. Iyer's family home in Santa Barbara burned down due to a wildfire in 1990, which had a deep impact on his perspective on 'being at home'. In his literary essays he repeatedly says: “For more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil, than with a piece of soul.… I am not rooted in a place, I think, so much as in certain values and affiliations and friendships that I carry everywhere I go; my home is both invisible and portable."
Pico describes this time in our world as the Productivity Age, the age of Perpetual Motion or our Epidemic of Rushing, and he says “it’s increasingly hard — yet increasingly imperative — to honour stillness, to build pockets of it into our lives and hold on to some direction in a madly accelerating world.”
In an article about his book “The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere”, he talks about his travels in North Korea, Iran and also his meeting with Leonard Cohen, who in 1994 started a 5yr retreat at Mt. Baldy Zen Center, serving as assistant to a great Japanese Zen teacher Kyozan Joshu Sasaki. (During his time at the Zen Center, Cohen was ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and given the Dharma name Jikan — Pali for "revealed contemplation" or “silence.” Jikan, refers specifically to “the silence between two thoughts”.)
Pico describes the meditation and periods of sitting still in beautiful words: The pleasure of sitting still is "a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it", and going nowhere as a way of “moving closer to the senses”.
After a thirty-year study of time diaries, two sociologists found that Americans work fewer hours now than we did in the 1960s, but we feel as if we’re working more. We have the sense, too, of running at top speed and never being able to catch up.
After meeting with Cohen, Pico writes: "We’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. 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."
Not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it’s often freedom from information, the chance to sit still.
Taking time to sit still, going nowhere shouldn’t be an indulgence but a necessity. We can all use periods or pockets of sitting still to gather our resources – “our less visible resources”, as Pico describes it. Sitting still isn’t about turning our 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.
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