Stillness Is the Key Read online

  Temperance. That’s the key. Intellectually, we know this. It’s only in flashes of insight or tragedy that we feel it.

  In 2010, Marco Rubio was pacing the halls of his home, making fund-raising calls for his surprise Senate bid, when his three-year-old son snuck out the back door and fell into the pool. Rubio had heard the chime of the door opening, assumed someone else was paying attention, and returned to his important phone call. A few minutes later, he found his son floating facedown in their pool, barely breathing.

  Even after this near tragedy he returned almost immediately to work—his ambition, like Lincoln’s, a “little engine that knew no rest.” Only with distance could Rubio begin to see the cost of this drive, what important things we miss when we give ourselves over to it entirely. As he wrote, “I think I understand now that the restlessness we feel as we make our plans and chase our ambitions is not the effect of their importance to our happiness and our eagerness to attain them. We are restless because deep in our hearts we know now that our happiness is found elsewhere, and our work, no matter how valuable it is to us or to others, cannot take its place. But we hurry on anyway, and attend to our business because we need to matter, and we don’t always realize we already do.”

  Have you ever held a gold medal or a Grammy or a Super Bowl ring? Have you ever seen a bank balance nudging up into the seven figures? Maybe you have, maybe you possess these things yourself. If you do, then you know: They are nice but they change nothing. They are just pieces of metal, dirty paper in your pocket, or plaques on a wall. They are not made of anything strong or malleable enough to plug even the tiniest hole in a person’s soul. Nor do they extend the length of one’s life even one minute. On the contrary, they may shorten it!

  They can also take the joy out of the thing we used to love to do. More does nothing for the one who feels less than, who cannot see the wealth that was given to them at birth, that they have accumulated in their relationships and experiences. Solving your problem of poverty is an achievable goal and can be fixed by earning and saving money. No one could seriously claim otherwise. The issue is when we think these activities can address spiritual poverty.

  Accomplishment. Money. Fame. Respect. Piles and piles of them will never make a person feel content.

  If you believe there is ever some point where you will feel like you’ve “made it,” when you’ll finally be good, you are in for an unpleasant surprise. Or worse, a sort of Sisyphean torture where just as that feeling appears to be within reach, the goal is moved just a little bit farther up the mountain and out of reach.

  You will never feel okay by way of external accomplishments. Enough comes from the inside. It comes from stepping off the train. From seeing what you already have, what you’ve always had.

  If a person can do that, they are richer than any billionaire, more powerful than any sovereign.

  Yet instead of seizing this path to power, we choose ingratitude and the insecurity of needing more, more, more. “We are here as if immersed in water head and shoulders underneath the great oceans,” said the Zen master Gensha, “and yet how pitiously we are extending our hands for water.” We think we need more and don’t realize we already have so much. We work so hard “for our families” that we don’t notice the contradiction—that it’s because of work that we never see them.

  Enough.

  Now, there is a perfectly understandable worry that contentment will be the end of our careers—that if we somehow satisfy this urge, all progress in our work and in our lives will come to a screeching halt. If everyone felt good, why would they keep trying so hard? First, it must be pointed out that this worry itself is hardly an ideal state of mind. No one does their best work driven by anxiety, and no one should be breeding insecurity in themselves so that they might keep making things. That is not industry, that is slavery.

  We were not put on this planet to be worker bees, compelled to perform some function over and over again for the cause of the hive until we die. Nor do we “owe it” to anyone to keep doing, doing, doing—not our fans, not our followers, not our parents who have provided so much for us, not even our families. Killing ourselves does nothing for anybody.

  It’s perfectly possible to do and make good work from a good place. You can be healthy and still and successful.

  Joseph Heller believed he had enough, but he still kept writing. He wrote six novels after Catch-22 (when a reporter criticized him by saying he hadn’t written anything as good as his first book, Heller replied, “Who has?”), including a number one bestseller. He taught. He wrote plays and movies. He was incredibly productive. John Stuart Mill, after his breakdown, fell in love with poetry, met the woman who would eventually become his wife, and began to slowly return to political philosophy—and ultimately had enormous impact on the world. Indeed, Western democracies are indebted to him for many changes he helped bring about.

  The beauty was that these creations and insights came from a better—a stiller—place inside both men. They weren’t doing it to prove anything. They didn’t need to impress anyone. They were in the moment. Their motivations were pure. There was no insecurity. No anxiety. No creeping, painful hope that this would finally be the thing that would make them feel whole, that would give them what they had always been lacking.

  What do we want more of in life? That’s the question. It’s not accomplishments. It’s not popularity. It’s moments when we feel like we are enough.

  More presence. More clarity. More insight. More truth.

  More stillness.

  BATHE IN BEAUTY

  In the face of the Sublime, we feel a shiver . . . something too large for our minds to encompass. And for a moment, it shakes us out of our smugness and releases us from the deathlike grip of habit and banality.

  —ROBERT GREENE

  On Wednesday morning, February 23, 1944, Anne Frank climbed up to the attic above the annex where her family had been hiding for two long years to visit Peter, the young Jewish boy who lived with them. After Peter finished his chores, the two of them sat down at Anne’s favorite spot on the floor and looked out the small window to the world they had been forced to leave behind.

  Staring at the blue sky, the leafless chestnut tree below, birds swooping and diving in the air, the two were entranced to the point of speechlessness. It was so quiet, so serene, so open compared to their cramped quarters.

  It was almost as if the world wasn’t at war, as if Hitler had not already killed so many millions of people and their families didn’t spend each day at risk of joining the dead. Despite it all, beauty seemed to reign. “As long as this exists,” Anne thought to herself, “this sunshine and this cloudless sky, and as long as I can enjoy it, how can I be sad?”

  She would later write in her diary that nature was a kind of cure-all, a comfort available to any and all who suffer. Indeed, whether it was the blooming of spring or the starkness of winter, even when it was dark and raining, when it was too dangerous to open the window and she had to sit in the stifling, suffocating heat to do it, Anne always managed to find in nature something to boost her spirits and center herself. “Beauty remains, even in misfortune,” she wrote. “If you just look for it, you discover more and more happiness and regain your balance.”

  How true that is. And what a source of peace and strength it can be.

  The trackless woods. A quiet child, lying on her belly, reading a book. The clouds cutting over the wing of an airplane, its exhausted passengers all asleep. A man reading in his seat. A woman sleeping. A stewardess resting her feet. The rosy fingertips of dawn coming up over the mountain. A song on repeat. That song’s beat, lining up exactly with the rhythm of events. The pleasure of getting an assignment in before a deadline, the temporary quiet of an empty inbox.

  This is stillness.

  Rose Lane Wilder wrote of looking out over the grassy plateau in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia:

  Here there was
only sky, and a stillness made audible by the brittle grass. Emptiness was so perfect all around me that I felt a part of it, empty myself; there was a moment in which I was nothing at all—almost nothing at all.

  The term for this is exstasis—a heavenly experience that lets us step outside ourselves. And these beautiful moments are available to us whenever we want them. All we have to do is open our souls to them.

  There is a story about the Zen master Hyakujo, who was approached by two students as he began his morning chores on the farm attached to his temple. When the students asked him to teach them about the Way, he replied, “You open the farm for me and I will talk to you about the great principle of Zen.” After they finished their labors and walked to the master for their lesson, he simply turned to face the fields, which the sun was just then rising above, extended his arms out in the direction of the serene expanse, and said nothing.

  That was the Way. Nature. The cultivated soil. The growing crops. The satisfaction of good hard work. The poetry of the earth. As it was in the beginning, as it will be forever.

  Not that all beauty is so immediately beautiful. We’re not always on the farm or at the beach or gazing out over sweeping canyon views. Which is why the philosopher must cultivate the poet’s eye—the ability to see beauty everywhere, even in the banal or the terrible.

  Marcus Aurelius, who is supposedly this dark, depressive Stoic, loved beauty in his own Whitmanesque way. Why else would he write so vividly of the ordinary way that “baking bread splits in places and those cracks, while not intended in the baker’s art, catch our eye and serve to stir our appetite,” or the “charm and allure” of nature’s process, the “stalks of ripe grain bending low, the frowning brow of the lion, the foam dripping from the boar’s mouth.” Even of dying, he writes, “Pass through this brief patch of time in harmony with nature. Come to your final resting place gracefully, just as a ripened olive might drop, praising the earth that nourished it and grateful to the tree that gave it growth.”

  The philosopher and the poet, seeing the world the same way, both engaged in the same pursuit, as Thomas Aquinas said, the study of “wonder.”

  It was Edward Abbey, the environmental activist and writer, who said that even the word wildness itself was music. It’s music we can listen to anytime we like, wherever we live, whatever we do for a living. Even if we can’t visit, we can think of traipsing through the pine-bedded floor of the forest, of drifting down a slow-moving river, of the warmth of a campfire. Or, like Anne Frank, we can simply look out our window to see a tree. In doing this, in noticing, we become alive to the stillness.

  It is not the sign of a healthy soul to find beauty in superficial things—the adulation of the crowd, fancy cars, enormous estates, glittering awards. Nor to be made miserable by the ugliness of the world—the critics and haters, the suffering of the innocent, injuries, pain and loss. It is better to find beauty in all places and things. Because it does surround us. And will nourish us if we let it.

  The soft paw prints of a cat on the dusty trunk of a car. The hot steam wafting from the vents on a New York City morning. The smell of asphalt just as the rain begins to fall. The thud of a fist fitting perfectly into an open hand. The sound of a pen signing a contract, binding two parties together. The courage of a mosquito sucking blood from a human who can so easily crush it. A basket full of vegetables from the garden. The hard right angles that passing trucks cut out of the drooping branches of trees next to a busy road. A floor filled with a child’s toys, arranged in the chaos of exhausted enjoyment. A city arranged the same way, the accumulation of hundreds of years of spasmodic, independent development.

  Are you starting to see how this works?

  It’s ironic that stillness is rare and fleeting in our busy lives, because the world creates an inexhaustible supply of it. It’s just that nobody’s looking.

  After his breakdown and nearly two years of struggle and depression resulting from overstimulation and too much study, where did John Stuart Mill find peace again for the first time? In the poetry of William Wordsworth. And what was the inspiration of so much of Wordsworth’s poetry? Nature.

  Theodore Roosevelt was sent west by his doctor after the death of his mother and wife to lose himself in the bigness of the Dakota Badlands. Yes, Teddy was a hunter and a rancher and a man’s man, but his two greatest passions? Sitting quietly on a porch with a book and birdwatching. The Japanese have a concept, shinrin yoku—forest bathing—which is a form of therapy that uses nature as a treatment for mental and spiritual issues. Hardly a week passed, even when he was president, that Roosevelt didn’t take a forest bath of some kind.

  How much cleaner we would feel if we took these baths as often as we took hot showers. How much more present we would be if we saw what was around us.

  Bathe is an important word. There is something about water, isn’t there? The sight of it. The sound of it. The feel of it. Those seeking stillness could find worse ways to wash away the troubles and turbulence of the world than actual water. A dive into a nearby river. The bubbling fountain in a Zen garden. The reflecting pool of a memorial for those we have lost. Even, in a pinch, a sound machine loaded with the noises of the crashing ocean waves.

  To those reeling from trauma or a stressful profession as much as to those suffering from the ennui of modern life, Professor John Stilgoe has simple advice:

  Get out now. Not just outside, but beyond the trap of the programmed electronic age so gently closing around so many people. . . . Go outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, look around. Do not jog. Do not run. . . . Instead pay attention to everything that abuts the rural road, the city street, the suburban boulevard. Walk. Stroll. Saunter. Ride a bike and coast along a lot. Explore.

  There is peace in this. It is always available to you.

  Don’t let the beauty of life escape you. See the world as the temple that it is. Let every experience be churchlike. Marvel at the fact that any of this exists—that you exist. Even when we are killing each other in pointless wars, even when we are killing ourselves with pointless work, we can stop and bathe in the beauty that surrounds us, always.

  Let it calm you. Let it cleanse you.

  ACCEPT A HIGHER POWER

  Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself.

  —ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  For nearly a hundred years, one of the most difficult steps in the twelve steps of “recovery” has not been producing a fearless moral inventory of one’s failings or the making of amends. It’s not admitting you have a problem, finding a sponsor, or attending meetings.

  The step that many addicts—particularly the ones who fancy themselves thinkers—struggle with intensely is the acknowledgment of the existence of a higher power. They just don’t want to admit that they “have come to believe a Power greater than themselves could restore them to sanity.”

  This seemingly simple step is hard, but not because the world has become increasingly secular since Alcoholics Anonymous’s founding in 1935. In fact, one of the founders of AA was, in his words, a “militant agnostic.” Acknowledging a higher power is difficult because submitting to anything other than their own desires is anathema to what one addict describes as the “pathological self-centeredness” of addiction.

  “I don’t believe in God” is the most common objection to Step 2. “There’s no evidence of a higher power,” they say. “Look at evolution. Look at science.” Or they might question what the hell any of this has to do with sobriety anyway. Can’t they just stop using drugs and follow the other steps? “What does religion or faith have to do with anything?”

  These are perfectly reasonable questions. And yet they don’t matter.

  Because Step 2 isn’t really about God. It’s about surrender. It’s about faith.

  Remember, the only way to get over the willful will—the force that Awa Kenzo believed was causing everyone, not just addicts, to miss the targets we
aim for—is to let go, at the deep, soul level.

  While addiction is undoubtedly a biological disease, it is also, in a more practical sense, a process of becoming obsessed with one’s own self and the primacy of one’s urges and thoughts. Therefore, admitting that there is something bigger than you out there is an important breakthrough. It means an addict finally understands that they are not God, that they are not in control, and really never have been. By the way, none of us are.

  The twelve-step process is not itself transformative. It’s the decision to stop and to listen and to follow that does all the work.

  If you really look at the teachings, Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t say you have to believe in Jesus or go to church. Only that you accept “God as we understand him.” That means that if you want to believe in Mother Earth, or Providence, or Destiny, or Fate, or Random Luck, that’s up to you.

  To the Stoics, their higher power was the logos—the path of the universe. They acknowledged fate and fortune and the power these forces had over them. And in acknowledging these higher powers, they accessed a kind of stillness and peace (most simply because it meant less fighting battles for control!) that helped them run empires, survive slavery or exile, and ultimately even face death with great poise. In Chinese philosophy, dao—the Way—is the natural order of the universe, the way of a higher spirit. The Greeks not only believed in many different gods, but also that individuals were accompanied by a daemon, a guiding spirit that led them to their destiny.

  The Confucians believed in Tian, 天—a concept of heaven that guided us while we were here on earth and assigned us a role or purpose in life. The Hindus believed that Brahman was the highest universal reality. In Judaism, Yahweh () is the word for Lord. Each of the major Native American tribes had their own word for the Great Spirit, who was their creator and guiding deity. Epicurus wasn’t an atheist but rejected the idea of an overbearing or judgmental god. What deity would want the world to live in fear? Living in fear, he said, is incongruent with ataraxia.