The idea of going nowhere

 None of us, of course, would want to be in a Nowhere we hadn’t chosen, as prisoners or invalids are. Whenever I travel to North Korea or Yemen—to any of the world’s closed or impoverished places—I see how almost anyone born to them would long to be anywhere else, and to visit other countries with the freedom that some of the rest of us enjoy. From San Quentin to New Delhi, the incarcerated are taught meditation, but only so they can see that within their confinement there may be spots of liberation. Otherwise, those in solitary may find themselves bombarded by the terrors and unearthly visitations that Emily Dickinson knew in her “still—Volcano—Life.”

I once went into the woods of Alberta and sat in a cabin day after day with letters from Dickinson, the poet famous for seldom leaving her home. Her passion shook me till I had to look away, the feeling was so intense and caged; her words were explosives in a jewel box. I imagined standing with the woman in white at her window, watching her brother with his young wife, Susan—to whom Dickinson addressed some of her most passionate letters (“Oh my darling one”; “my heart is full of you, none other than you is in my thoughts”)—in the house they shared one hundred yards away, across the garden.  I felt her slipping through her parlor while her brother conducted an adulterous affair in the next room, betraying the Sue they both adored. I saw her crafting, in a fury, her enflamed letters to her “Master,” the atmosphere charged around her in her solitude, or writing, “I see thee better—in the Dark.”

She could feel Death calling for her in her bed, she wrote, as she plumbed the shadows within the stillness; again and again she imagined herself posthumous, mourners “treading—treading” in her brain. She knew that you do not have to be a chamber to be haunted, that “Ourself behind ourself concealed— / Should startle most.” Her unsettling words brought to mind poor Herman Melville, conjuring up at the same time his own version of a motionless ghost, Bartleby, a well-spoken corpse conducting a makeshift Occupy Wall Street resistance by sitting in a lawyer’s office in lower Manhattan, “preferring” not to go anywhere.

Nowhere can be scary, even if it’s a destination you’ve chosen; there’s nowhere to hide there. Being locked inside your head can drive you mad or leave you with a devil who tells you to stay at home and stay at home till you are so trapped inside your thoughts that you can’t step out or summon the power of intention.

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 long nights alone in the dark. Visiting a monastery, I also realized how easy it might be to go there as an escape, or in the throes of an infatuation  certain not to last. As in any love affair, the early days of a romance with stillness give little sign of the hard work to come.

Sometimes, when I returned to my monastery in midwinter, the weather was foul as I pulled up. The rain pattered down on the tin roof of my trailer throughout the night. The view through the picture windows was of nothing but mist. I didn’t see or hear a living soul for days on end, and my time felt like a trial, a penitential exercise in loneliness. The downpour was so unending that I couldn’t go out, and so I sat in the fog, stuck and miserable, reminded how the external environment can too easily be a reflection of—sometimes a catalyst for—an inner one. (...)

The idea of going nowhere is, as mentioned, as universal as the law of gravity; that’s why wise souls from every tradition have spoken of it. “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. 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. Sit there.”

Yet the days of Pascal and even Admiral Byrd seem positively tranquil by today’s standards. The amount of data humanity will collect while you’re reading this book is five times greater than the amount that exists in the entire Library of Congress. Anyone reading this book will take in as much information today as Shakespeare took in over a lifetime. 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. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes—which means we’re never caught up with our lives.

 And the more facts come streaming in on us, the less time we have to process any one of them. The one thing technology doesn’t provide us with is a sense of how to make the best use of technology. 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.

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. 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.

The Art of Stillness 

Pico Iyer