Art of stillness

Travel writer Pico Iyer has some insights for all

I forget how much I appreciate Pico Iyer, arguably the greatest travel writer alive today. He has taught me a lot about stillness and finding the stillness within me - even when I am zooming around the planet.

Anne Lamott in Conversation with Pico Iyer on AFLAME

I read this great interview the Six Senses did with him recently and he’s been on my mind. Plus he has a new book out called “Aflame,” which tells of his decades visiting a silent Benedictine retreat.

In Aflame, Iyer chronicles three decades of transformative stays at a tiny monastery high above the sea in Big Sur, California.

Over half a lifetime he has made more than one hundred retreats in this small Benedictine hermitage—sometimes for a week, sometimes for almost a month, often staying with the monks in their enclosure—emerging, nearly always, with a rare sense of joy, clarity, and liberation.

Nowhere in his life of travels has so transformed or reoriented him as his time in silence and his encounters with men and women of every age and background along the monastery road. Radiant, intimate, and gripping, Aflame is a transfixing mix of meditation and storytelling, as Iyer interweaves his moments of invigorated transport with warm and sometimes humorous meetings around the hermitage—all lit up by the grounding wisdom of other monastics he has known, among them the Dalai Lama, Leonard Cohen, and a wise Zen abbess.

Already being hailed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama as a book that “may help many to lead lives of greater compassion and deeper peace of mind,” Aflame offers ageless counsel about the power of silence and what it can teach us about how to live, how to love, and, ultimately, how to die.

And years earlier he wrote this other fantastic book called “The Art of Stillness” - with Ted talks to accompany - that stays with me always. I shall give you some of the keys points.

The book explores the benefits of slowing down and being still in a world that's constantly moving. And he argues that stillness can help us reconnect with what's important, process our experiences, and rediscover a sense of awe:

• Stillness is invigorating

  In an age of speed it is the ultimate luxurious (especially in an age of distraction).

• Stillness can help us reconnect

  Yes, it can reconnect us with what's important, process our experiences, and rediscover a sense of awe.

• Stillness can help us fall in love with the world

  I know that sitting still is a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it. Try it. Every morning I sit at candle light (thank you Jeanette Winterson)

• Stillness can help us be more mindful

  Spending time in solitude can help us be more mindful of what's going on inside us.

• Stillness can help us see the little miracles

  When we're always rushing, we miss the little miracles around us.

Listen to Terry Gross - whom I adore - interview him on NPR.

A little biography in case you didn’t know him…

Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England in 1957. He won a King’s Scholarship to Eton and then a Demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was awarded a Congratulatory Double First with the highest marks of any English Literature student in the university. In 1980 he became a Teaching Fellow at Harvard, where he received a second Master’s degree, and in subsequent years he has received an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters.

Since 1982 he has been a full-time writer, publishing 15 books, translated into 23 languages, on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to globalism, from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism. They include such long-running sellers as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, The Open Road and The Art of Stillness. He has also written the introductions to more than 70 other books, as well as liner and program notes, a screenplay for Miramax and a libretto. At the same time he has been writing up to 100 articles a year for Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, the Financial Times and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide. I loved these recent pieces he wrote for The Guardian, and the LA Times.

His four talks for TED have received more than 10 million views so far.

Since 1992 Iyer has spent much of his time at a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California, and most of the rest in suburban Japan.