Stillness Is the Key Read online

  As society advanced and jobs became increasingly less physical, but more exhausting mentally and spiritually, it became common for leisure to include a diverse array of activities, from reading to woodwork. Jesus, for instance, rested out on the water, fishing with his disciples. Seneca wrote about how Socrates loved to play with children, how Cato loved to relax with wine, how Scipio was passionate about music. And we know this because Seneca’s own leisure from politics was writing thoughtful, philosophical letters to friends. John Cage picked up the hobby of mushroom hunting. He observed that traipsing through the woods opened up the mind and encouraged ideas to “fly into one’s head like birds.” Fred Rogers had his swimming. Saint Teresa of Ávila loved to dance, and so did Mae Carol Jemison, the first African American woman in space. Simón Bolívar too found dancing a helpful tool in balancing the affairs of state and the burdens of revolution. The writer David Sedaris likes to walk the back roads of his neighborhood in the English countryside and pick up garbage, often for hours at a time. John Graves poured himself into carving out his ranch from the Texas Hill Country, fixing fences, raising cattle, and cultivating the land. Herbert Hoover loved fishing so much, he wrote a book about it. The title: Fishing for Fun: And to Wash Your Soul.

  The swordsman Musashi, whose work was aggressively and violently physical, took up painting late in life, and observed that each form of art enriched the other. Indeed, flower arranging, calligraphy, and poetry have long been popular with Japanese generals and warriors, a wonderful pairing of opposites—strength and gentleness, stillness and aggression. Hakuin, the Zen master, excelled at painting and calligraphy, producing thousands of works in his lifetime. NBA champion Chris Bosh taught himself how to code. Einstein had his violin, Pythagoras has his lyre. William Osler, the founder of Johns Hopkins University, told aspiring medical students that when chemistry or anatomy distressed their soul, “seek peace in the great pacifier, Shakespeare.”

  Reading. Boxing. Collecting stamps. Whatever. Let it relax you and give you peace.

  In his essay on leisure, Josef Pieper wrote that “the ability to be ‘at leisure’ is one of the basic powers of the human soul.” But that’s what’s so interesting about it. It’s a physical state—a physical action—that somehow replenishes and strengthens the soul. Leisure is not the absence of activity, it is activity. What is absent is any external justification—you can’t do leisure for pay, you can’t do it to impress people.

  You have to do it for you.

  But the good news is that leisure can be anything. It can be cutting down trees, or learning another language. Camping or restoring old cars. Writing poetry or knitting. Running marathons, riding horses, or walking the beach with a metal detector. It can be, as it was for Churchill, painting or bricklaying.

  Pieper said that leisure was like saying a prayer before bed. It might help you go to sleep—just as leisure might help you get better at your job—but that can’t be the point.

  Many people find relief in strenuous exercise. Sure, it might make them stronger at work, but that’s not why they do it. It’s meditative to put the body in motion and direct our mental efforts at conquering our physical limitations. The repetition of a long swim, the challenge of lifting heavy weights, the breathlessness of a sprint—there is a cleansing experience, even if it is accompanied by suffering. It’s a wonderful feeling there, right before the sweat breaks, when we can feel ourselves working the stress up from the deep recesses of our soul and our conscious mind and then out of the body.

  “If an action tires your body but puts your heart at ease,” Xunzi said, “do it.” There is a reason philosophers in the West often trained in wrestling and boxing, while philosophers in the East trained in martial arts. These are not easy activities, and if you’re not present while you do them, you’ll get your ass kicked.

  The point isn’t to simply fill the hours or distract the mind. Rather, it’s to engage a pursuit that simultaneously challenges and relaxes us. Students observed that in his leisure moments, Confucius was “composed and yet fully at ease.” (He was also said to be very skilled at “menial” tasks.) That’s the idea. It’s an opportunity to practice and embody stillness but in another context.

  It’s in this leisure, Ovid observed, that “we reveal what kind of people we are.”

  Assembling a puzzle, struggling with a guitar lesson, sitting on a quiet morning in a hunting blind, steadying a rifle or a bow while we wait for a deer, ladling soup in a homeless shelter. Our bodies are busy, but our minds are open. Our hearts too.

  Of course, leisure can easily become an escape, but the second that happens it’s not leisure anymore. When we take something relaxing and turn it into a compulsion, it’s not leisure, because we’re no longer choosing it.

  There is no stillness in that.

  While we don’t want our leisure to become work, we do have to work to make time for them. “For me,” Nixon wrote in his memoir, “it is often harder to be away from the job than to be working at it.” On the job, we are busy. We are needed. We have power. We are validated. We have conflict and urgency and an endless stream of distractions. Nixon said that the constant grind was “absolutely necessary for superior performance.” But was his performance really that superior? Or was that the whole problem?

  At leisure, we are with ourselves. We are present. It’s us and the fishing pole and the sound of the line going into the water. It’s us and the waiting, giving up control. It’s us and the flash cards for the language we are learning. It’s the humility of being bad at something because we are a beginner, but having the confidence to trust in the process.

  No one is making us do this. We can quit if we’re struggling, we can cut corners and cheat (ourselves) without fear of repercussion. No money is on the line to motivate us, no rewards or validation but the experience. To do leisure well—to be present, to be open, to be virtuous, to be connected—is hard. We cannot let it turn into a job, into another thing to dominate and to dominate others through.

  We must be disciplined about our discipline and moderate in our moderation.

  Life is about balance, not about swinging from one pole to the other. Too many people alternate between working and bingeing, on television, on food, on video games, on lying around wondering why they are bored. The chaos of life leads into the chaos of planning a vacation.

  Sitting alone with a canvas? A book club? A whole afternoon for cycling? Chopping down trees? Who has the time?

  If Churchill had the time, if Gladstone had the time, you have the time.

  Won’t my work suffer if I step away from it?

  Seneca pointed out how readily we take risks with uncertain payoffs in our career—but we’re afraid to risk even one minute of time for leisure.

  There’s nothing to feel guilty about for being idle. It’s not reckless. It’s an investment. There is nourishment in pursuits that have no purpose—that is their purpose.

  Leisure is also a reward for the work we do. When we think about the ideal “Renaissance man,” we see someone who is active and busy, yes, but also fulfilled and balanced. Getting to know yourself is the luxury of the success you’ve had. Finding fulfillment and joy in the pursuit of higher things, you’ve earned it. It’s there for you, take it.

  Make the time. Build the discipline.

  You deserve it. You need it.

  Your stillness depends on it.

  BEWARE ESCAPISM

  Me miserable! which way shall I fly

  Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?

  Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.

  —JOHN MILTON

  After the crushing disappointment of the unexpected failure of his great novel Ask the Dust, John Fante needed an escape. He would have loved to hit the road, to flee the town and the state that had broken his heart, but he couldn’t. Fante was alternately too poor and then too successful as a screenwriter to afford to leav
e Hollywood. And soon after that, he was too married and had too many kids to support.

  Over the years he found many ways to numb the pain he felt. By playing pinball for hours on end (his addiction was extreme enough to be immortalized as a character in William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life). By drinking for hours on end in Hollywood bars, where he kept company with F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. By spending so many hours on the course that he turned his ever-patient wife, Joyce, into a golf widow.

  It wasn’t restoration that Fante was chasing, nor was it leisure, it was escape from real life.

  In his own words, Fante pissed away decades golfing, reading, and drinking, and by extension not writing novels. Because that felt better than getting rejected again and again. Because it was easier than sitting alone by himself in a room, doing battle with the demons that made his writing so beautiful in the first place.

  That’s the difference between leisure and escapism. It’s the intention. Travel is wonderful, but is there not something sad to the story in Johnny Cash’s life, as his first marriage fell apart and his music became more formulaic and less fulfilling? Landing in L.A. at the end of a long tour, instead of heading home to his family, he walked up to the counter and asked to buy a ticket. To where? “Wherever the next plane will take me,” he told the attendant.

  Despair and restlessness go together.

  The problem is that you can’t flee despair. You can’t escape, with your body, problems that exist in your mind and soul. You can’t run away from your choices—you can only fix them with better choices.

  There’s nothing wrong with a good vacation (particularly if the aim is solitude and quiet) or a round of golf, just as there is nothing wrong with cracking a beer to take the edge off. Certainly Churchill loved to travel and enjoyed champagne, though he stunk at golf.

  But too often, the frenzied or the miserable think that an escape—literal or chemical—is a positive good. Sure, the rush of traveling, the thrill of surfing, or the altered state of a psychedelic can relieve some of the tension that’s built up in our lives. Maybe you get some pretty pictures out of it, and some pseudo-profundity that impresses your friends.

  But when that wears off? What’s left?

  Nixon watched nearly five hundred movies during his time in the White House. We know the darkness he was running from. There’s no question that for Tiger Woods, his addictions were in part driven by a desire to escape the pain left over from his childhood. But each time he hopped on a private plane to Vegas instead of opening up to his wife (or to his father while he was still alive), he was setting himself up for more pain down the road. Each time John Fante hit the golf course instead of the keys of his typewriter, or went out drinking instead of being at home, he might have felt a temporary escape, but it came at a very high cost.

  When you defer and delay, interest is accumulating. The bill still comes due . . . and it will be even harder to afford then than it will be right now.

  The one thing you can’t escape in your life is yourself.

  Anyone who’s traveled long enough knows this. It’s eventually clear we carry with us on the road more baggage than just our suitcase and our backpacks.

  Emerson, who in his own life traveled to England and Italy and France and Malta and Switzerland (as well as extensively across America), pointed out that the people who built the sights and wonders that tourists liked to see didn’t do so while they traveled. You can’t make something great flitting around. You have to stick fast, like an axis of the earth. Those who think they will find solutions to all their problems by traveling far from home, perhaps as they stare at the Colosseum or some enormous moss-covered statue of Buddha, Emerson said, are bringing ruins to ruins. Wherever they go, whatever they do, their sad self comes along.

  A plane ticket or a pill or some plant medicine is a treadmill, not a shortcut. What you seek will come only if you sit and do the work, if you probe yourself with real self-awareness and patience.

  You have to be still enough to discover what’s really going on. You have to let the muddy water settle. That can’t happen if you’re jetting off from one place to another, if you’re packing your schedule with every activity you can think of in order to avoid the possibility of having to spend even a moment alone with your own thoughts.

  In the fourth century BC, Mengzi spoke of how the Way is near, but people seek it in what is distant. A few generations after that, Marcus Aurelius pointed out that we don’t need to “get away from it all.” We just need to look within. “Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions,” he said, “than your own soul.”

  The next time we feel the urge to flee, to hit the road or bury ourselves in work or activity, we need to catch ourselves. Don’t book a cross-country flight—go for a walk instead. Don’t get high—get some solitude, find some quiet. These are far easier, far more accessible, and ultimately far more sustainable strategies for accessing the stillness we were born with. Travel inside your heart and your mind, and let the body stay put. “A quick visit should be enough to ward off all,” Marcus wrote, “and send you back ready to face what awaits you.”

  Tuning out accomplishes nothing. Tune in.

  If true peace and clarity are what you seek in this life—and by the way, they are what you deserve—know that you will find them nearby and not far away. Stick fast, as Emerson said. Turn into yourself. Stand in place.

  Stand in front of the mirror. Get to know your front porch.

  You were given one body when you were born—don’t try to be someone else, somewhere else. Get to know yourself.

  Build a life that you don’t need to escape from.

  ACT BRAVELY

  To see people who will notice a need in the world and do something about it. . . . Those are my heroes.

  —FRED ROGERS

  In Camus’s final novel, The Fall, his narrator, Clamence, is walking alone on a street in Amsterdam when he hears what sounds like a woman falling into the water. He’s not totally certain that’s what he heard, but mostly, riding the high of a nice evening with his mistress, he does not want to be bothered, and so he continues on.

  A respected lawyer with a reputation as a person of great virtue in his community, Clamence returns to his normal life the following day and attempts to forget the sound he heard. He continues to represent clients and entertain his friends with persuasive political arguments, as he always has.

  Yet he begins to feel off.

  One day, after a triumphant appearance in court arguing for a blind client, Clamence gets the feeling he is being mocked and laughed at by a group of strangers he can’t quite locate. Later, approaching a stalled motorist at an intersection, he is unexpectedly insulted and then assaulted. These encounters are unrelated, but they contribute to a weakening of the illusions he has long held about himself.

  It is not with an epiphany or from a blow to the head that the monstrous truth of what he has done becomes clear. It is a slow, creeping realization that comes to Clamence that suddenly and irrevocably changes his self-perception: That night on the canal he shrugged off a chance to save someone from committing suicide.

  This realization is Clamence’s undoing and the central focus of the book. Forced to see the hollowness of his pretensions and the shame of his failings, he unravels. He had believed he was a good man, but when the moment (indeed moments) called for goodness, he slunk off into the night.

  It’s a thought that haunts him incessantly. As he walks the streets at night, the cry of that woman—the one he ignored so many years ago—never ceases to torment him. It toys with him too, because his only hope of redemption is that he might hear it again in real life and then seize the opportunity to dive in and save someone from the bottom of the canal.

  It’s too late. He has failed. He will never be at peace again.

  The story is fictional, of course, but a deeply incisive on
e, written not coincidentally in the aftermath of the incredible moral failings of Europe in the Second World War. Camus’s message to the reader pierces us like the scream of the woman in Clamence’s memory: High-minded thoughts and inner work are one thing, but all that matters is what you do. The health of our spiritual ideals depends on what we do with our bodies in moments of truth.

  It is worth comparing the agony and torture of Clamence with a more recent example from another French philosopher, Anne Dufourmantelle, who died in 2017, aged fifty-three, rushing into the surf to save two drowning children who were not her own. In her writing, Anne had spoken often of risk—saying that it was impossible to live life without risk and that in fact, life is risk. It is in the presence of danger, she once said in an interview, that we are gifted with the “strong incentive for action, dedication, and surpassing oneself.”

  And when, on the beach in Saint-Tropez, she was faced with a moment of danger and risk, an opportunity to turn away or to do good, she committed the full measure of devotion to her ideals.

  What is better? To live as a coward or to die a hero? To fall woefully short of what you know to be right or to fall in the line of duty? And which is more natural? To refuse a call from your fellow humans or to dive in bravely and help them when they need you?

  Stillness is not an excuse to withdraw from the affairs of the world. Quite the opposite—it’s a tool to let you do more good for more people.

  Neither the Buddhists nor the Stoics believed in what has come to be called “original sin”—that we are a fallen and flawed and broken species. On the contrary, they believe we were born good. To them, the phrase “Be natural” was the same as “Do the right thing.” For Aristotle, virtue wasn’t just something contained in the soul—it was how we lived. It was what we did. He called it eudaimonia: human flourishing.