Stillness Is the Key Read online

  Make no mistake—this was not some glib reassurance. Rogers, building on advice from his own mother when he was a child, had managed to find comfort and goodness inside an event that would provoke only pain and anger and fear in other people. And he figured out how to communicate it in a way that continues to make the world a better place long after his death.

  So much of the distress we feel comes from reacting instinctually instead of acting with conscientious deliberation. So much of what we get wrong comes from the same place. We’re reacting to shadows. We’re taking as certainties impressions we have yet to test. We’re not stopping to put on our glasses and really look.

  Your job, after you have emptied your mind, is to slow down and think. To really think, on a regular basis.

  . . . Think about what’s important to you.

  . . . Think about what’s actually going on.

  . . . Think about what might be hidden from view.

  . . . Think about what the rest of the chessboard looks like.

  . . . Think about what the meaning of life really is.

  The choreographer Twyla Tharp provides an exercise for us to follow:

  Sit alone in a room and let your thoughts go wherever they will. Do this for one minute. . . . Work up to ten minutes a day of this mindless mental wandering. Then start paying attention to your thoughts to see if a word or goal materializes. If it doesn’t, extend the exercise to eleven minutes, then twelve, then thirteen . . . until you find the length of time you need to ensure that something interesting will come to mind. The Gaelic phrase for this state of mind is “quietness without loneliness.”

  If you invest the time and mental energy, you’ll not only find what’s interesting (or your next creative project), you’ll find truth. You’ll find what other people have missed. You’ll find solutions to the problems we face—whether it’s insight to the logic of the Soviets and their missiles in Cuba, or how to move your business forward, or how to make sense of senseless violence.

  These are answers that must be fished from the depths. And what is fishing but slowing down? Being both relaxed and highly attuned to your environment? And ultimately, catching hold of what lurks below the surface and reeling it in?

  START JOURNALING

  Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain.

  —JACK LONDON

  For her thirteenth birthday, a precocious German refugee named Anne Frank was given a small red-and-white “autograph book” by her parents. Although the pages were designed to collect the signatures and memories of friends, she knew from the moment she first saw it in a store window that she would use it as a journal. As Anne wrote in her first entry on June 12, 1942, “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you’ll be a great source of comfort and support.”

  No one could have anticipated just how much comfort and support she’d need. Twenty-four days after that first entry, Anne and her Jewish family were forced into hiding, in the cramped attic annex over her father’s warehouse in Amsterdam. It’s where they would spend the next two years, hoping the Nazis would not discover them.

  Anne Frank had wanted a diary for understandable reasons. She was a teenager. She had been lonely, scared, and bored before, but now she was cooped up in a set of cramped, suffocating rooms with six other people. It was all so overwhelming, all so unfair and unfamiliar. She needed somewhere to put those feelings.

  According to her father, Otto, Anne didn’t write every day, but she always wrote when she was upset or dealing with a problem. She also wrote when she was confused, when she was curious. She wrote in that journal as a form of therapy, so as not to unload her troubled thoughts on the family and compatriots with whom she shared such unenviable conditions. One of her best and most insightful lines must have come on a particularly difficult day. “Paper,” she said, “has more patience than people.”

  Anne used her journal to reflect. “How noble and good everyone could be,” she wrote, “if at the end of the day they were to review their own behavior and weigh up the rights and wrongs. They would automatically try to do better at the start of each new day, and after a while, would certainly accomplish a great deal.” She observed that writing allowed her to watch herself as if she were a stranger. At a time when hormones usually make teenagers more selfish, she regularly reviewed her writings to challenge and improve her own thinking. Even with death lurking outside the doors, she worked to make herself a better person.

  The list of people, ancient and modern, who practiced the art of journaling is almost comically long and fascinatingly diverse. Among them: Oscar Wilde, Susan Sontag, Marcus Aurelius, Queen Victoria, John Quincy Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Shawn Green, Mary Chesnut, Brian Koppelman, Anaïs Nin, Franz Kafka, Martina Navratilova, and Ben Franklin.

  All journalers.

  Some did it in the morning. Some did it sporadically. Some, like Leonardo da Vinci, kept their notebooks on their person at all times. John F. Kennedy kept a diary during his travels before World War II, and then as president was more of a notetaker and a doodler (which is shown in studies to improve memory) on White House stationery both to clarify his thinking and to keep a record of it.

  Obviously this is an intimidating list of individuals. But Anne Frank was thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years old. If she can do it, what excuse do we have?

  Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, seems to have done his writing and reflection in the evenings, much along the lines of Anne Frank’s practice. When darkness had fallen and his wife had gone to sleep, he explained to a friend, “I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.” Then he would go to bed, finding that “the sleep which follows this self-examination” was particularly sweet. Anyone who reads him today can feel him reaching for stillness in these nightly writings.

  Michel Foucault talked of the ancient genre of hupomnemata (notes to oneself). He called the journal a “weapon for spiritual combat,” a way to practice philosophy and purge the mind of agitation and foolishness and to overcome difficulty. To silence the barking dogs in your head. To prepare for the day ahead. To reflect on the day that has passed. Take note of insights you’ve heard. Take the time to feel wisdom flow through your fingertips and onto the page.

  This is what the best journals look like. They aren’t for the reader. They are for the writer. To slow the mind down. To wage peace with oneself.

  Journaling is a way to ask tough questions: Where am I standing in my own way? What’s the smallest step I can take toward a big thing today? Why am I so worked up about this? What blessings can I count right now? Why do I care so much about impressing people? What is the harder choice I’m avoiding? Do I rule my fears, or do they rule me? How will today’s difficulties reveal my character?*

  While there are plenty of people who will anecdotally swear to the benefits of journaling, the research is compelling too. According to one study, journaling helps improve well-being after traumatic and stressful events. Similarly, a University of Arizona study showed that people were able to better recover from divorce and move forward if they journaled on the experience. Keeping a journal is a common recommendation from psychologists as well, because it helps patients stop obsessing and allows them to make sense of the many inputs—emotional, external, psychological—that would otherwise overwhelm them.

  That’s really the idea. Instead of carrying that baggage around in our heads or hearts, we put it down on paper. Instead of letting racing thoughts run unchecked or leaving half-baked assumptions unquestioned, we force ourselves to write and examine them. Putting your own thinking down on paper lets you see it from a distance. It gives you objectivity that is so often missing when anxiety and fears and frustrations flood your mind.

 
What’s the best way to start journaling? Is there an ideal time of day? How long should it take?

  Who cares?

  How you journal is much less important than why you are doing it: To get something off your chest. To have quiet time with your thoughts. To clarify those thoughts. To separate the harmful from the insightful.

  There’s no right way or wrong way. The point is just to do it.

  If you’ve started before and stopped, start again. Getting out of the rhythm happens. The key is to carve out the space again, today. The French painter Eugène Delacroix—who called Stoicism his consoling religion—struggled as we struggle:

  I am taking up my Journal again after a long break. I think it may be a way of calming this nervous excitement that has been worrying me for so long.

  Yes!

  That is what journaling is about. It’s spiritual windshield wipers, as the writer Julia Cameron once put it. It’s a few minutes of reflection that both demands and creates stillness. It’s a break from the world. A framework for the day ahead. A coping mechanism for troubles of the hours just past. A revving up of your creative juices, for relaxing and clearing.

  Once, twice, three times a day. Whatever. Find what works for you.

  Just know that it may turn out to be the most important thing you do all day.

  CULTIVATE SILENCE

  All profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence. . . . Silence is the general consecration of the universe.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE

  The fascination with silence began early in life for the composer John Cage. In 1928, in a speech contest for Los Angeles High School, he tried to persuade his fellow students and the judges that America should institute a national day of quiet. By observing silence, he told the audience, they would finally be able to “hear what other people think.”

  It was the beginning of Cage’s lifelong exploration and experimentation with what it means to be quiet and the opportunities for listening that this disciplined silence creates.

  Cage wandered after high school. He toured Europe. He studied painting. He taught music. He composed classical music. He was an avid observer. Born in 1915 in California, he was just old enough to remember what premechanized life was like, and as the century became modern—and technology remade every industry and occupation—he began to notice just how loud everything had become.

  “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise,” he would say. “When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.”

  To Cage, silence was not necessarily the absence of all sound. He loved the sound of a truck at 50 miles an hour. Static on the radio. The hum of an amplifier. The sound of water on water. Most of all, he appreciated the sounds that were missed or overwhelmed by our noisy lives.

  In 1951, he visited an anechoic chamber, the most advanced soundproof room in the world at the time. Even there, with his highly sensitive musician’s ear, he heard sounds. Two sounds, one high and one low. Speaking with the engineer afterward, he was amazed to discover that the source of those sounds was his own nervous system and the pumping of his blood.

  How many of us have ever come close to this kind of quiet? Reducing the noise and chatter around you to the degree that you can literally hear your own life? Can you imagine? What you could do with that much silence!

  It was a reaction against unnecessary noise that inspired Cage’s most famous creation, 4′33″ , which was originally conceived with the title Silent Prayer. Cage wanted to create a song identical to the popular music of the day—it’d be the same length, it’d be performed live and played on the radio like every other song. The only difference was that 4′33″ would be a “piece of uninterrupted silence.”

  Some people saw this as an absurd joke, a Duchampian send-up of what constitutes “music.” In one sense, it was. (Cage thought it would be funny to sell the “song” to Muzak Co. to be played in elevators.) But it was also inspired by his lifelong study of Zen philosophy, a philosophy that finds fullness in emptiness. The performance instructions for the song are themselves a beautiful contradiction: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action.”

  In fact, 4′33″ was never about achieving perfect silence—it’s about what happens when you stop contributing to the noise. The song was first performed at Woodstock, New York, by the pianist David Tudor.* “There’s no such thing as silence,” Cage said of that first performance. “What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”

  We were given two ears and only one mouth for a reason, the philosopher Zeno observed. What you’ll notice when you stop to listen can make all the difference in the world.

  Too much of our lives is defined by noise. Headphones go in (noise-canceling headphones so that we can better hear . . . noise). Screens on. Phones ringing. The quiet metal womb of a jumbo jet, traveling at 600 miles per hour, is filled with nothing but people trying to avoid silence. They’d rather watch the same bad movies again and again, or listen to some inane interview with an annoying celebrity, than stop and absorb what’s happening around them. They’d rather close their mind than sit there and have to use it.

  “Thought will not work except in silence,” Thomas Carlyle said. If we want to think better, we need to seize these moments of quiet. If we want more revelations—more insights or breakthroughs or new, big ideas—we have to create more room for them. We have to step away from the comfort of noisy distractions and stimulations. We have to start listening.

  In downtown Helsinki, there is a small building called the Kamppi Chapel. It’s not a place of worship, strictly speaking, but it’s as quiet as any cathedral. Quieter, in fact, because there are no echoes. No organs. No enormous creaking doors. It is, in fact, a Church of Silence. It’s open to anyone and everyone who is interested in a moment of quiet spirituality in a busy city.

  You walk in and there is just silence.

  Glorious, sacred silence. The kind of silence that lets you really start hearing.

  Randall Stutman, who for decades has been the behind-the-scenes advisor for many of the biggest CEOs and leaders on Wall Street, once studied how several hundred senior executives of major corporations recharged in their downtime. The answers were things like sailing, long-distance cycling, listening quietly to classical music, scuba diving, riding motorcycles, and fly-fishing. All these activities, he noticed, had one thing in common: an absence of voices.

  These were people with busy, collaborative professions. People who made countless high-stakes decisions in the course of a day. But a couple hours without chatter, without other people in their ear, where they could simply think (or not think), they could recharge and find peace. They could be still—even if they were moving. They could finally hear, even if over the sounds of a roaring river or the music of Vivaldi.

  Each of us needs to cultivate those moments in our lives. Where we limit our inputs and turn down the volume so that we can access a deeper awareness of what’s going on around us. In shutting up—even if only for a short period—we can finally hear what the world has been trying to tell us. Or what we’ve been trying to tell ourselves.

  That quiet is so rare is a sign of its value. Seize it.

  We can’t be afraid of silence, as it has much to teach us. Seek it.

  The ticking of the hands of your watch is telling you how time is passing away, never to return. Listen to it.

  SEEK WISDOM

  Imperturbable wisdom is worth everything.

  —DEMOCRITUS

  In Greece in 426 BC, the priestess of Delphi answered a question posed to her by a citizen of Athens: Was t
here anyone wiser than Socrates?

  Her answer: No.

  This idea that Socrates could be the wisest of them all was a surprise, to Socrates especially.

  Unlike traditionally wise people who knew many things, and unlike pretentious people who claimed to know many things, Socrates was intellectually humble. In fact, he spent most of his life sincerely proclaiming his lack of wisdom.

  Yet this was the secret to his brilliance, the reason he has stood apart for centuries as a model of wisdom. Six hundred years after Socrates’s death, Diogenes Laërtius would write that what made Socrates so wise was that “he knew nothing except just the fact of his ignorance.” Better still, he was aware of what he did not know and was always willing to be proven wrong.

  Indeed, the core of what we now call the Socratic method comes from Socrates’s real and often annoying habit of going around asking questions. He was constantly probing other people’s views. Why do you think that? How do you know? What evidence do you have? But what about this or that?

  This open-minded search for truth, for wisdom, was what made Socrates the most brilliant and challenging man in Athens—so much so that they later killed him for it.

  All philosophical schools preach the need for wisdom. The Hebrew word for wisdom is (chokmâh); the corresponding term in Islam is ḥikma, and both cultures believe that God was an endless source of it. The Greek word for wisdom was sophia, which in Latin became sapientia (and why man is called Homo sapiens). Both the Epicureans and the Stoics held sophia up as a core tenet. In their view, wisdom was gained through experience and study. Jesus advised his followers to be as wise as snakes and as innocent as doves. Proverbs 4:7 holds acquiring wisdom to be the most important thing people can do.