{"id":7407,"date":"2015-07-11T18:37:51","date_gmt":"2015-07-11T22:37:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=7407"},"modified":"2015-07-11T18:37:51","modified_gmt":"2015-07-11T22:37:51","slug":"the-art-of-stillness-adventures-in-going-nowhere-by-pico-iyerted-bookssimon-schuster-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/the-art-of-stillness-adventures-in-going-nowhere-by-pico-iyerted-bookssimon-schuster-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere by Pico IyerTED Books\/Simon & Schuster, 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think I’m probably not the ideal audience for Pico Iyer’s very short TED book, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere<\/em>. That isn’t to say I didn’t find things to like in it, but I think it might have been better for people who haven’t tried any sort of sitting-in-silence practice at all (I went to a Quaker high school, and had a brief period of going to Quaker meeting semi-regularly as an adult), and\/or who don’t already feel convinced of the benefits of sometimes doing nothing\/going nowhere\/carving out space for quiet in one’s life. I like that while Iyer himself goes on retreats to a monastery, he realizes that isn’t going to work for everyone, in terms of time commitment or finances or personality: near the end of the book he says that “Nowhere has to become somewhere we visit in the corners of our lives by taking a daily run or going fishing or just sitting quietly for thirty minutes every morning” (63). <\/p>\n

This book consists of six chapters and an introduction, separated by 2-page spreads of color photos by Eydís Einarsdóttir of horizons and clouds, water and sky. (You can see the photos on Einarsdóttir’s website<\/a>: this one<\/a> is totally my favorite). The book starts and ends with stories about Leonard Cohen (who has spent a significant amount of time at a Zen monastery in California, and who famously went on tour in his seventies: Iyer talks about his time at the monastery as stepping away from the world in order to more fully engage with it) but other than that it has a pretty loose structure, meandering through Iyer’s own experiences (deciding to spend a year in Kyoto at the age of 29, after being a successful writer in New York), those of people he’s met (like Matthieu Ricard, the Dalai Lama’s French translator and the monk of The Monk and the Philosopher<\/i><\/a>), general ideas about choosing to step away from busy-ness (e.g. the idea of taking breaks from technology on a “secular Sabbath”), and specific examples of stillness being useful (e.g. a study about “a yoga-based breathing program” for military vets at risk of PTSD). Iyer’s writing sometimes feels a little name-dropping, but sometimes feels really lyrical and pleasing—I haven’t read anything else by him, but this book does make me want to. One sentence that really made me roll my eyes, though: “It takes courage, of course, to step out of the fray, as it takes courage to do anything that’s necessary, whether tending to a loved one on her deathbed or turning away from that sugarcoated doughnut” (62). (That donut part feels really unnecessarily judge-y about other people’s food choices, and is extra weird given that there’s another part of the book where Iyer talks about a balance between Nowhere and normal life, using the example of Leonard Cohen leaving the monastery to go get a Filet-o-Fish sandwich and watch TV at home.) <\/p>\n

Some highlights: the idea of “sitting still as a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it” (4). A quote from Abraham Joshua Heschel about the Sabbath being “a cathedral in time rather than space,” and then Iyer’s own description of how “the one day a week we take off becomes a vast empty space through which we can wander, without agenda, as through the light-filled passageways of Notre Dame” (55). And this description of Iyer’s first visit to the Benedictine retreat house he ended up returning to many times: <\/p>\n

A fox alighted on the splintered fence outside, and I couldn’t stop watching, transfixed. A deer began grazing just outside my window, and it felt like a small miracle stepping into my life. Bells tolled far above, and I thought I was listening to the “Hallelujah Chorus.” (15)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think I’m probably not the ideal audience for Pico Iyer’s very short TED book, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere. That isn’t to say I didn’t find things to like in it, but I think it might have been better for people who haven’t tried any sort of sitting-in-silence practice at all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7407\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}