Stillness, wherever: In this instance, the sunset from Carmel Beach, California
Pico Iyer is a very known travel writer and observer of the world. His most recent book, The Art of Stillness, is an invitation to his readers to choose the best destination of all—Nowhere. Going nowhere, says Iyer, “just may be the grand adventure that makes sense of everywhere else.”
This may be surprising travel advice from a man who has indulged his oversized Wanderlust for most of his life. But in this slim book Iyer steps away from his adventurous observations of the outward bound life and turns his gaze on his own interior landscape of being a writer.
Writers…are obliged by our professions to spend much of our time going nowhere. Our creations come not when we’re out in the world, gathering impressions, but when we’re sitting still, turning those impressions into sentences. Our job, you could say, it to turn, through stillness, a life of movement into art. Sitting still is our workplace, sometimes our battlefield.
The battlefield of sitting still is even more complicated by a cultural milieu that increasingly mediates against any stillness in our lives, ever. And yet every maker—writers, visual artists, musicians—knows how essential it is to get there.
Unfortunately, once you do achieve a sitting stillness, that doesn’t mean you’ve arrived.
Nowhere can be scary, even if it’s a destination you’ve chosen: there’s nowhere to hide there…A life of stillness can sometimes lead not to art but to doubt or dereliction; anyone who longs to see the light is signing on for many nights alone in the dark.
One of my running themes on this blog has been the parallels between the creative life and the life of contemplation. Iyer turns to that path for clues as well. He spends time in monasteries and retreats. Drawing from anecdotes of several well known contemplatives such as Leonard Cohen, Annie Dillard, Thomas Merton, Emily Dickinson and Matthieu Ricard, Iyer learns by studying their patterns.
One of the first insights is that things are not as they appear. Iyer quotes Thomas Merton: “One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves.”
Nowhere has its own time zone and climate system, a place where the rules are a bit different. Near the end of the book Iyer shares his own wise advice, words that resonate with my experiences in the studio:
It’s only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day. And it’s only by going nowhere—by sitting still or letting my mind relax—that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.
Making space for the unbidden: That’s a worthwhile mantra for what studio time is all about.
Some interesting parallels to Tessa Hull’s post for which my friend Hannah Stephenson provided a link: http://www.projectroomseattle.org/off-paper-blog/2014/11/on-silence-off-papers-editor-returns-from-hiding
Maureen, That’s a wonderful post. Thanks for including the link.
Beautiful, thank you for sharing!