One day I visited Google's headquarters to give a talk on the Dalai Lama book I'd completed and, like most visitors, was much impressed by the trampolines, the indoor tree houses, and the workers at the time enjoying a fifth of their working hours free, letting their minds wander off leash to where inspiration might be hiding. It's only by stepping farther back and standing still that we can begin to see what that canvas (which is our life) really means, and to take in the larger picture. It's easy to feel as if we're standing two inches away from a huge canvas that's noisy and crowded and changing with every microsecond. Put another way, the ability to gather information, which used to be so crucial, is now far less important than the ability to sift through it.
Pico iyer the art of stillness how to#
The one thing technology doesn't provide us with is a sense of how to make the best use of technology. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes - which means we're never caught up with our lives.Īnd the more facts come streaming in on us, the less time we have to process any one of them. Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from a phone call. Anyone reading it will take in as much information today as Shakespeare took in over a lifetime. The amount of data humanity will collect while you're reading The Art of Stillness is five times greater than the amount that exists in the entire Library of Congress. Yet the days of Pascal and even Admiral Byrd seem positively tranquil by today's standards. Byrd spent nearly five months alone in a shack in the Antarctic, in temperatures that sank to 70 degrees below zero, he emerged convinced that "Half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need." Or, as they sometimes say around Kyoto, "Don't just do something. "All the unhappiness of men," the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal famously noted, "arises from one simple fact: that they cannot sit quietly in their chamber." After Admiral Richard E. The idea of going nowhere is as universal as the law of gravity that's why wise souls from every tradition have spoken of it.
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