Stillness Is the Key Read online

  It’s dangerous business, though, creating a monster to protect your wounded inner child.

  The insecure lens. The anxious lens. The persecuted lens. The prove-them-all-wrong lens. The will-you-be-my-father? lens that Leonardo had. These adaptations, developed early on to make sense of the world, don’t make our lives easier. On the contrary. Who can be happy that way? Would you put a nine-year-old in charge of anything stressful or dangerous or important?

  The movie producer Judd Apatow has talked about something he realized after a big fight during the filming of one of his movies. For years, he had seen every note the studio or the executives had for him, every attempt at restrictions or influence, as if it were the obnoxious meddling of his parents. Instinctively, emotionally, he had fought and resisted each intervention. Who are these idiots to tell me what to do? Why are they always trying to boss me around? Why are they so unfair?

  Each of us on occasion has surprised ourself with a strong reaction to someone’s innocuous comments, or thrown a fit when some authority figure tried to direct our actions. Or felt the pull of attraction to a type of relationship that never ends well. Or to a type of behavior that we know is wrong. It’s almost primal how deep these feelings go—they’re rooted in our infancy.

  It took therapy and self-reflection (and probably the observations of his wife) for Apatow to understand that the movie studio was not his parents. This was a business transaction and a creative discussion, not another instance of a talented boy being bossed around by otherwise absent parents.

  But with that realization came stillness, if only because it deintensified arguments at work. Think about it: How much better and less scary life is when we don’t have to see it from the perspective of a scared, vulnerable child? How much lighter will our load be if we’re not adding extra baggage on top?

  It will take patience and empathy and real self-love to heal the wounds in your life. As Thich Nhat Hanh has written:

  After recognizing and embracing our inner child, the third function of mindfulness is to soothe and relieve our difficult emotions. Just by holding this child gently, we are soothing our difficult emotions and we can begin to feel at ease. When we embrace our strong emotions with mindfulness and concentration, we’ll be able to see the roots of these mental formations. We’ll know where our suffering has come from. When we see the roots of things, our suffering will lessen. So mindfulness recognizes, embraces, and relieves.

  Take the time to think about the pain you carry from your early experiences. Think about the “age” of the emotional reactions you have when you are hurt or betrayed or unexpectedly challenged in some way. That’s your inner child. They need a hug from you. They need you to say, “Hey, buddy. It’s okay. I know you’re hurt, but I am going to take care of you.”

  The functional adult steps in to reassert and reassure. To make stillness possible.

  We owe it to ourselves as well as to the people in our lives to do this. Each of us must break the link in the chain of what the Buddhists call samsara, the continuation of life’s suffering from generation to generation.

  The comedian Garry Shandling lost his brother, Barry, at age ten to cystic fibrosis, and was left for the rest of his life at the mercy of his distraught and controlling mother, who was so disturbed by the loss of her older son that she forbade Garry from attending the funeral for fear that he would see her cry.

  But one day, as a much older man, Garry wrote in his diary a formula that might help him overcome that pain and not only heal his own inner child but pass on the lesson to the many surrogate children he had as a mentor and elder in show business.* The formula was simple and is key to breaking the cycle and stilling the deep anguish we carry around with us:

  Give more.

  Give what you didn’t get.

  Love more.

  Drop the old story.

  Try it, if you can.

  BEWARE DESIRE

  Every man has a passion gnawing away at the bottom of his heart, just as every fruit has its worm.

  —ALEXANDRE DUMAS

  John F. Kennedy achieved indisputable greatness through stillness in those thirteen fateful days in October 1962. The world is forever in his debt. But we should not allow that shining moment to obscure the fact that, like all of us, he had demons that dogged and haunted him and undermined that same greatness—and as a result, his stillness.

  Kennedy grew up in a house where his father often brought his mistresses home for dinner and on family vacations. It was a house where anger and rage were common too. “When I hate some sonofabitch,” Joseph Kennedy liked to say, “I hate him until I die.” It’s probably not a surprise, then, that his young son would develop his own bad habits and wrestle with controlling his urges and appetites.

  The first time Kennedy’s sex drive got him in trouble was during the early days of World War II, when he began dating Inga Arvad, a beautiful Dutch journalist who many suspected was a Nazi spy. When he was running for president, he had an affair with Judith Exner, who happened to be the girlfriend of Sam Giancana, a Chicago mobster. But instead of suffering any consequences for theses massive lapses of judgment, Kennedy skated away clean each time, a fact that only escalated his risky behavior.

  Kennedy was no romantic. Girlfriends would describe his insatiable but joyless sex drive. According to one conquest, sex was “just physical and social activity to him,” a way to stave off the boredom, or get a rush. He didn’t care about the other person, and in time, he almost didn’t care about the pleasure it gave himself either. As Kennedy told the prime minister of Britain in a moment of very uncomfortable honesty, if he went without sex for a few days, he’d get headaches. (His father had told his sons that he couldn’t sleep unless he’d “had a lay.”) Given Kennedy’s terrible back, having sex was probably painful too—but he never let that stop him.

  In one shameful moment, as Soviet and American forces teetered on the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy brought in a nineteen-year-old student from Wheaton College for a rendezvous in a hotel near the White House. Here was a man who had no idea how much longer he would live, who was working with inhuman dedication in that crisis to curb the dangerous impulses of his nation’s enemies . . . cheating on his wife, choosing to spend what were potentially his last moments on earth in the sheets with a random girl half his age instead of with his scared and vulnerable family.

  That doesn’t sound like stillness. It doesn’t sound particularly glamorous either.

  It sounds like a man who is spiritually broken, at the whims of his worst impulses, unable to think clearly or prioritize. But before we condemn Kennedy as a despicable addict or abuser, we should look at our own failings. Do we not fall prey to various desires in our own personal lives? Do we not know better and do it anyway?

  Lust is a destroyer of peace in our lives: Lust for a beautiful person. Lust for an orgasm. Lust for someone other than the one we’ve committed to be with. Lust for power. Lust for dominance. Lust for other people’s stuff. Lust for the fanciest, best, most expensive things that money can buy.

  And is this not at odds with the self-mastery we say we want?

  A person enslaved to their urges is not free—whether they are a plumber or the president.

  How many great men and women end up losing everything—end up, in some cases, literally behind bars—because they freely chose to indulge their endless appetites, whatever they happened to be?

  And at least power and sex and attention are pleasurable. The most common form of lust is envy—the lust for what other people have, for the sole reason that they have it. Joseph Epstein’s brilliant line is: “Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.” Democritus, twenty-four hundred years before him: “An envious man pains himself as though he were an enemy.”

  No one in the sway of envy or jealousy has a chance to think clearly or live peacefully. How can they?
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  It is an endless loop of misery. We’re envious of one person, while they envy somebody else. The factory worker wishes desperately to be a millionaire, the millionaire envies the simple life of the nine-to-five worker. The famous wish they could go back to the private life that so many others would gladly give away; the man or woman with a beautiful partner thinks only of someone a little more beautiful. It’s sobering to consider that the rival we’re so jealous of may in fact be jealous of us.

  There is also a “have your cake and eat it too” immaturity to envy. We don’t simply want what other people have—we want to keep everything we have and add theirs to it, even if those things are mutually exclusive (and on top of that, we also want them to not have it anymore). But if you had to trade places entirely with the person you envy, if you had to give up your brain, your principles, your proudest accomplishments to live in their life, would you do it? Are you willing to pay the price they paid to get what you covet?

  No, you aren’t.

  Epicurus, again the supposed hedonist, once said that “sex has never benefited any man, and it’s a marvel if it hasn’t injured him.” He came up with a good test anytime he felt himself being pulled by a strong desire: What will happen to me if I get what I want? How will I feel after?

  Indeed, most desires are at their core irrational emotions, and that’s why stillness requires that we sit down and dissect them. We want to think ahead to the refractory period, to consider the inevitable hangover before we take a drink. When we do that, these desires lose some of their power.

  To the Epicureans real pleasure was about freedom from pain and agitation. If wanting something makes you miserable while you don’t have it, doesn’t that diminish the true value of the reward? If getting what you “want” has its consequences too, is that really pleasurable? If the same drive that helps you achieve initially also leads you inevitably to overreach or overdo, is it really an advantage?

  Those seeking stillness need not become full-fledged ascetics or puritans. But we can take the time to realize how much pull and power desire can have on us, and beyond the momentary pleasure this might provide us, it deprives us of the deeper peace that we seek.

  Think about the times when you feel best. It’s not when you are pining away. It’s not when you get what you pined for either. There is always a tinge of disappointment or loss at the moment of acquisition.

  Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita calls desire the “ever-present enemy of the wise . . . which like a fire cannot find satisfaction.” The Buddhists personified this demon in the figure of Mara. They said it was Mara who tried to tempt and distract Buddha from the path of enlightenment, from stillness. When Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his notebook about how to portray envy, he said that she should be shown as lean and haggard due to her state of perpetual torment. “Make her heart gnawed by a swelling serpent,” he said, “make her ride upon death because Envy never dies.” It’d be hard to find a better depiction of lust either, which Leonardo said puts us “on the level of beasts.”

  None of us are perfect. We have biologies and pathologies that will inevitably trip us up. What we need then is a philosophy and a strong moral code—that sense of virtue—to help us resist what we can, and to give us the strength to pick ourselves back up when we fail and try to do and be better.

  We can also rely on tools to help us resist harmful desires. Saint Athanasius of Alexandria wrote in his Vita Antonii that one of the benefits of journaling—Confessions, as the Christians called the genre—was that it helped stop him from sinning. By observing and then writing about his own behavior, he was able to hold himself accountable and make himself better:

  Let us each note and write down our actions and impulses of the soul . . . as though we were to report them to each other; and you may rest assured that from utter shame of becoming known we shall stop sinning and entertaining sinful thoughts altogether. . . . Just as we would not give ourselves to lust within sight of each other, so if we were to write down our thoughts as if telling them to each other, we shall so much the more guard ourselves against foul thoughts for shame of being known. Now, then, let the written account stand for the eyes of our fellow ascetics, so that blushing at writing the same as if we were actually seen, we may never ponder evil.

  To have an impulse and to resist it, to sit with it and examine it, to let it pass by like a bad smell—this is how we develop spiritual strength. This is how we become who we want to be in this world.

  Only those of us who take the time to explore, to question, to extrapolate the consequences of our desires have an opportunity to overcome them and to stop regrets before they start. Only they know that real pleasure lies in having a soul that’s true and stable, happy and secure.

  ENOUGH

  History relates no instance in which a conqueror has been surfeited with conquests.

  —STEFAN ZWEIG

  The writers Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse Five, and Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, were once at a party in a fancy neighborhood outside New York City. Standing in the palatial second home of some boring billionaire, Vonnegut began to needle his friend. “Joe,” he said, “how does it feel that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel has earned in its entire history?”

  “I’ve got something he can never have,” Heller replied.

  “And what on earth could that be?” Vonnegut asked.

  “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

  Earl Woods called that the e-word, like it was an expletive. In truth, enough is a beautiful thing.

  Imagine the stillness that sense of enough brought Joseph Heller and everyone else who has it. No ceaseless wanting. No insecurity of comparison. Feeling satisfied with yourself and your work? What gift!

  Saying the word “enough” is not enough. Deeply spiritual, introspective work is required to understand what that idea means—work that may well destroy illusions and assumptions we have held our entire lives.

  John Stuart Mill, the philosopher and boy genius who before he hit puberty read and mastered nearly every major classical text in the original Greek or Latin, is an illustration of just how terrifying this process can be. Extremely driven (by his father and by himself), one day, at around twenty years old, Mill stopped to think, for the first time, about what he was chasing. As he writes:

  It occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.

  What ensued was a devastating mental breakdown that required years of recovery. Yet Mill was probably lucky to undergo it so early. Most people never learn that their accomplishments will ultimately fail to provide the relief and happiness we tell ourselves they will. Or they come to understand this only after so much time and money, so many relationships and moments of inner peace, were sacrificed on the altar of achievement. We get to the finish line only to think: This is it? Now what?

  It is a painful crossroads. Or worse, one that we ignore, stuffing those feelings of existential crisis down, piling on top of them meaningless consumption, more ambition, and the delusion that doing more and more of the same will eventually bring about different results.

  In a way, this is a curse of one of our virtues. No one achieves excellence or enlightenment without a desire to get better, without a tendency to explore potential areas of improvement. Yet the desire—or the need—for more is often at odds with happiness. Billie Jean King, the tennis great, has spoken about this, about how the mentality that gets an athlete to the top so often prevents them from enjoying the thing they worked so hard for. The need for of progress can be the
enemy of enjoying the process.

  There is no stillness for the person who cannot appreciate things as they are, particularly when that person has objectively done so much. The creep of more, more, more is like a hydra. Satisfy one—lop it off the bucket list—and two more grow in its place.

  The best insights on enough come to us from the East. “When you realize there is nothing lacking,” Lao Tzu says, “the whole world belongs to you.” The verse in The Daodejing:

  The greatest misfortune is to not know contentment.

  The word calamity is the desire to acquire.

  And so those who know the contentment of contentment are always content.

  The Western philosophers wrestled with the balance between getting more and being satisfied. Epicurus: “Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.” Thomas Traherne: “To have blessings and to prize them is to be in Heaven; to have them and not to prize them is to be in Hell. . . . To prize them and not to have them is to be in Hell.” And the Stoics who lived in the material world of an empire at its peak knew the truth about money. Seneca had piles of it and he knew how little it correlated with peace. His work is filled with stories of people who drove themselves to ruin and misery chasing money they didn’t need and honors beyond their share.