Category: inspiration

The urgency of slowing down (The Art of Stillness)

Much I could share with you about this weekend as I sit here with my beach-tousled wet hair. To be honest, though, mostly I felt arrested with uncertainty for a good part of it (nothing new here), and this morning I went running to clear my head.

I’ve been trying to listen to Podcasts to exercise my listening attention span. Little-known fact, I’m actually a terrible listener. Rather, my listening comprehension skills can be inhibited because I get distracted easily. I have to work really hard at listening. This is why I always write notes verbatim, to hide this fact and make up for this weakness.

As luck would have it, a few months ago I had downloaded On Being’s interview with Pico Iyer, entitled The Art of Stillness. (Here is the transcript if, like me, you are a stronger reader than listener.) Serendipitously, I just started reading a book about traveling that references a quote of his in the first few pages.

As I ran along the water wrestling with my feelings of having to compete with worlds beyond my reach, Iyer’s words calmed me and filled me with hope that stillness can be the answer. It is my daily work to be enough for myself, to remember that “the point of gathering stillness is not to enrich the sanctuary or the mountaintop, but to bring that calm into the motion, the commotion of the world.”

It’s funny, when we go to an airport, nowadays, there are so many recharging stations for devices and very few for our soul.

Krista Tippett mentions Iyer’s insistence that we are rediscovering the “urgency of slowing down.” Iyer responds, “Well, I think we’re all feeling dizzy.” I struggle to remember that I choose where my attention goes, and I choose what I feel I’m “competing” with.

We got onto this accelerating roller coaster that we never quite asked to get on, and we don’t know how to get off…

And so I sometimes think that travel is how I get my excitement and stimulation, but stillness is how I keep myself sane. You know, Pascal, wonderfully, in the 17th century said our problem is distraction, but we try to distract ourselves from distractions. So we get even worse in this vicious cycle. So the only cure for distraction is attention. And I go to my monastery, and I go to Japan because they are cathedrals of attention. And they’re places where people are very attentive and where people like me can try to learn attention.

This relates to Mary Oliver’s discovery that “attention without feeling is just a report.” More and more, I try to slow down and examine my feelings of urgency or comparison or envy or hopelessness by becoming more aware of my immediate world, and being more grounded by practicing attention towards my inner being. Only then can I face outward and find the people to whom and activities/thoughts to which I should gift my attention.

But I mean, I was reading recently that there’s some new study of that as people — when we’re young, we’re kind of hardwired to find excitement and to find satisfaction in novelty. And that as we age, we more naturally find excitement and satisfaction in what is ordinary, in patterns and habits and kind of the everyday contours of our lives.

As Iyer says, “not everyone leans into stillness” even with the passage into older age. I can see some of my friends forever being caught up in the frenzy of novelty.

But I do believe that we have the ability to choose our ride rather than let ourselves feel carried away by currents we never decided to follow and rollercoasters we never hoped to get on. I can choose how to react, and I can choose the degree of vulnerability that I feel. It takes practice, it takes time. At first glance, the inside world can seem less appealing than the shiny, sparkly enticement of the outer world. I ask myself what my definition of luxury is. I try not to allow others’ expectations or desires dictate what my luxury looks like. I stop and ask myself whether the outer world that seems so terrifyingly impactful at the moment really reflects on the landscape I’m interested in at all.

And at some point, I thought, well, I’ve been really lucky to see many, many places. Now, the great adventure is the inner world that I’ve spent a lot of time gathering emotions, impressions, and experiences. Now, I just want to sit still for years on end, really, charting that inner landscape because I think anybody who travels knows that you’re not really doing so in order to move around — you’re traveling in order to be moved. And really what you’re seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you’re sleepwalking through your daily life.

On the great Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks received about 10,000 letters a year.

“I invariably reply to people under 10, over 90 or in prison,” he once said.

On observation:

“I am very tenacious, for better or worse,” he wrote in “A Leg to Stand On.” “If my attention is engaged, I cannot disengage it. This may be a great strength, or weakness. It makes me an investigator. It makes me an obsessional.”

“The thousand and one questions I asked as a child,” he wrote, “were seldom met by impatient or peremptory answers, but careful ones which enthralled me (though they were often above my head). I was encouraged from the start to interrogate, to investigate.”

On music:

“I haven’t heard of a human being who isn’t musical, or who doesn’t respond to music one way or another,” he told an audience at Columbia University in 2006. “I think we are an essentially, profoundly musical species. And I don’t know whether [language or music came first] — for all I know, language piggybacked on music.”

On writing:

Writing takes him to another place, Dr. Sacks says, “where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time.”
“In those rare, heavenly states of mind,” he goes on, “I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come, and that I have been writing all day.”

That writing, which Dr. Sacks says gives him a pleasure “unlike any other,” has also been a gift to his readers — of erudition, sympathy and an abiding understanding of the joys, trials and consolations of the human condition.
Referring to Nietzsche’s claim that listening to Bizet had made him a better philosopher, Dr. Sacks said, “I think Mozart makes me a better neurologist.”

On final rest:

“And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.”

May you rest in peace on this seventh day of life.

Hands across the ocean.

This week I sent out a TinyLetter about distance and in some ways also about the courage to write across any perceived distance. The previous letter was about loss, and not necessarily that of physical form.

Borges writes that “in due time other men will rewrite the same books and nothing will really be lost” (excerpt sent by a friend, pictured below):

I came across Claire Messud’s Why I Write (via Literary Hub). She quotes Rushdie on how we as writers hold on to things and try to prevent or assuage their inevitable loss by telling stories.

Rushdie wrote: “It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.” I, for my heart, couldn’t afford to lose these things. I could, instead, tell stories: I could become a writer.

In my letter I voiced my gratitude for living in an era that offers vast multitudes of methods for communicating. We’ve had books and poems for thousands of years, but now barriers of distance are easier to cross than ever with language. Messud uses the metaphorical British film quote “hands across the ocean” to indicate this power of words:

Even a single successful sentence can be transformative; and a single poem or novel can alter someone’s life forever. That, my friends, is “hands across the ocean,” and it’s a meeting that happens if not only, then most fully, through language. With words, we can travel across nations and through time; we can inhabit lives far from our own.

What is our hope for the experience of literature, if not to share this: shards of memory and new worlds discovered? What, indeed, if not this, is the best truth of our experience of life?

I have my own collection of little literary and philosophical heads, my own stock of single successful sentences. Each of us is constructed, like a magpie’s nest, from these as much as from our childhood experiences and our temperament and our loves and losses. We are as much the sum of our lived literary experiences as of our literally lived experiences. This, of course, is what T.S. Eliot expressed in The Waste Land, and his is one of the essential sentences I carry with me everywhere. I’ve slipped it into several of my books. “These are the fragments I have shored against my ruins.” That’s all. It’s why I write, really. Fail again, fail better—to cite another from my collection. A single successful sentence, a so-called philosophical hue. Each an invocation; each a hand across the ocean; each a seizing of power away from fear and desire; each a small magic.

Perhaps, as writers, we hope that the more we share, the less we lose.

Perhaps, as Borges insists, there is no actual loss due to the repetitive nature of the very experiences we write about. We truly are rewriting the tales of every generation before us.

I write to carry my past with me, as much as I write to let it go.

J.L. Carrell wrote: “If I could, I would move mountains to reach you. You must know that. If you are reading this, the mountains have proved beyond my strength.”

And so I write to reach you across distances I have found that I am unable to cross. I still may never arrive, but perhaps arrival was never the point. I write to take you with me, though we have no more shared road ahead.

Hands across the ocean. Words between our hearts.