Jean Stimmell is a retired stone mason and psychotherapist living in Northwood. He blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com and jstim.substack.com.

“In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.”

― Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness:
Adventures in Going Nowhere

I am looking with sweet regard at this photo taken at the apex of summer on the pond where I live. It is a hazy, sunny day, but dead still: There is no wind or the slightest breeze. The world is suspended in animation, more like a painting than a living landscape.

There’s no sense of foreboding, only a feeling of peace and serenity, a blessed escape from the jittery world of appearances, jarring like the flickering lines on the early TVs I watched as a kid.

Today, of course, things are different: TVs are now unblinking portals in technicolor, watching a world gone bonkers while our country rapidly unravels under our spastic new president.

Seeking stillness is my safe harbor in this storm. But I’m a piker compared to Pico Iver, the writer and world traveler who has carried finding peace and quiet to an extreme. He and his wife moved to a small, quiet village in Japan, electing to live in a tiny apartment without a bedroom or TV.

Pico recently wrote a fascinating little book about his transformation, “The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere⁠,” based on his TED talk. In it, he argues that our inner perspective — not the places we visit — tells us where we stand.

He quotes Admiral Richard E. Byrd, who had this to say after spending five months alone in a shack in the Antarctic in temperatures that dipped to 70 degrees below zero: “Half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.”

In many ways, Pico and I are kindred souls, like the way we feel about going places: “Every time I take a trip, the experience acquires meaning and grows deeper only after I get back home and, sitting still, begin to convert the sights I’ve seen into lasting insights,” he says.

He quotes like-minded individuals, like his friend Leonard Cohen, who spent years sequestered away at Buddhist retreats: “Going nowhere isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.”

Pico follows in the tradition of Joan Halifax, a well-known Buddhist anthropologist who reminds us Indigenous people live this higher truth every day of their lives: “This wisdom cannot be told, but it is to be found by each of us in the direct experience of silence, stillness, solitude, simplicity… and vision.” She says their wisdom is a precious resource that could help us repair our rapidly disintegrating world.⁠

Echoing this indigenous clear-sightedness, the Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr considers silence to be “the very foundation of all reality. It is that out of which all being comes and to which all things return.” Unless we learn to live there, “the rest of things — words, events, relationships, identities — all become rather superficial, without depth or context.⁠”⁠

Unfortunately, this sort of wisdom is too much for our success-driven, information-obsessed society to absorb, aimlessly chattering away with each other as we are like a class of kindergarteners who have gorged on too much candy and soda.