I have always been a useless person who avoided practical stuff and I always loved contemplation more and so I liked the first part of the book more. Depending on your inclinations you might like one part or the other more. The first part is more contemplative while the second part is more practical. In the second part, he describes how unplugging ourselves from this noise for even a short period of time everyday is reinvigorating and helps us see things from a fresh perspective and helps make our day more productive.
In the first part, Pico Iyer contrasts all the noise, action, distraction, interruption which are part of our everyday lives with stillness and describes how stillness looks like, when it is present and when it is practised. The book divides itself naturally into two parts, though the division is not a sharp line in the sand – it is more like the way one colour fades away into another. We feel that he is talking about us and our lives. More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk” “With machines coming to seem part of our nervous systems, while increasing their speed every season, we’ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off – our holy days, as some would have it our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. This book has a freshness to it, because the theme it addresses is very relevant to our twenty-first century way of life. In ‘ The Art of Stillness‘, Pico Iyer, who is a traveller and a travel writer, looks at our life today, the busy schedule we have, the multi-tasking we do, how we are always connected and plugged in through the convergence of communication systems and social media, and asks the question, whether we can switch off, whether we can unplug ourselves, whether we can get away from it all, whether it is beneficial, whether it is possible. It is a short book at around seventy pages and so I finished reading it soon.
THE ART OF STILLNESS PICO IYER SERIES
How Leonard Cohen’s Stint As a Buddhist Monk Can Help You Live an Enlightened LifeĬolin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at on Facebook.I got ‘ The Art of Stillness : Adventures in Going Nowhere‘ by Pico Iyer as a birthday present from one of my favourite friends. The Best Writing Advice Pico Iyer Ever Received But if you ever doubt its possibility, just revisit the last talk from Pico we featured, in which he describes his encounter with Leonard Cohen, the only man alive who has successfully combined the lifestyles of rock star and Zen monk.
THE ART OF STILLNESS PICO IYER OFFLINE
He connects all this with the 21st-century technology culture in which we find ourselves, citing the example of folks like Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly and even certain enlightenment-minded Googlers who regularly and rigorously detach themselves from certain kinds of modern devices, going “completely offline in order to gather the sense of direction and proportion they’ll need when they go online again.”Īchieving such a proper intellectual, psychological, social, and technological compartmentalization in life may seem like a rare trick to pull off. If we want to follow Pico’s example, we must strike a balance: we must process the time we spend doing something intensely-traveling, writing, programming, lifting weights, what have you-with time spent not doing that something, a pursuit in its own way as intense. What I’ve done with it sitting still-going back to it in my head, trying to understand it, finding a place for it in my thinking-that’s lasted 24 years already, and will probably last a lifetime.”
“24 years ago, I took the most mind-bending trip across North Korea,” he tells us, “but the trip lasted a few days. But he did start telling the world more about his long-standing habit of routinely seeking out the most quiet, least “connected” places he can-the seaside no-speech-allowed Catholic hermitage, the rural village outside Kyoto-in order to reflect upon the time he has spent circling the globe, transposing himself from culture to alien culture. Having known Pico Iyer for quite some time, on paper and in person, as a perpetual example and occasional mentor in the writing of place, it delights me to watch him attract more listeners than ever with the talks he’s given in recent years, the most popular of which advocate something called “stillness.” But at first I wondered: did this shift in subject mean that Iyer-a California-grown Brit from an Indian family who mostly lives in Japan (“a global village on two legs,” as he once called himself), known for books like Video Night in Kathmandu, Falling off the Map, and The Global Soul-had put his signature hard-traveling ways behind him?
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