The art of stillness

I'm a lifelong traveler.

Even as a little kid, I was actually

working out that it would be cheaper

to go to boarding school in England

than just to the best school down the road

from my parents' house in California.

So, from the time I was nine years old

I was flying alone several times a year

over the North Pole, just to go to school.

And of course the more I flew

the more I came to love to fly,

so the very week after I
graduated from high school,

I got a job mopping tables so that I could spend

every season of my 18th year

on a different continent.

And then, almost inevitably,

I became a travel writer so my job

and my joy could become one.

And I really began to feel

that if you were lucky enough to

walk around the candlelit temples of Tibet

or to wander along the seafronts in Havana

with music passing all around you,

you could bring those sounds
and the high cobalt skies

and the flash of the blue ocean

back to your friends at home,

and really bring some magic

and clarity to your own life.

Except, as you all know,

one of the first things you learn when you travel

is that nowhere is magical unless you can bring

the right eyes to it.

You take an angry man to the Himalayas,

he just starts complaining about the food.

And I found that the best way that I could develop

more attentive and more appreciative eyes

was, oddly,

by going nowhere, just by sitting still.

And of course sitting still is how many of us

get what we most crave

and need in our accelerated lives, a break.

But it was also the only way that I could find

to sift through the slideshow of my experience and

make sense of the future and the past.

And so, to my great surprise,

I found that going nowhere

was at least as exciting as
going to Tibet or to Cuba.

And by going nowhere,

I mean nothing more intimidating than

taking a few minutes out of every day or

a few days out of every season,

or even, as some people do,

a few years out of a life

in order to sit still long enough

to find out what moves you most,

to recall where your truest happiness lies

and to remember that sometimes

making a living and making a life

point in opposite directions.

And of course, this is what wise
beings through the centuries

from every tradition have been telling us.

It's an old idea.

More than 2,000 years ago,
the Stoics were reminding us

it's not our experience that makes our lives,

it's what we do with it.

Imagine a hurricane suddenly
sweeps through your town

and reduces every last thing to rubble.

One man is traumatized for life.

But another, maybe even his brother,

almost feels liberated, and
decides this is a great chance

to start his life anew.

It's exactly the same event,

but radically different responses.

There is nothing either good or bad,

as Shakespeare told us in "Hamlet,"

but thinking makes it so.

And this has certainly been
my experience as a traveler.

Twenty-four years ago I took
the most mind-bending trip

across North Korea.

But the trip lasted a few days.

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.

The trip, in other words, gave
me some amazing sights,

but it's only sitting still that allows me

to turn those into lasting insights.

And I sometimes think that so much of our life

takes place inside our heads,

in memory or imagination or
interpretation or speculation,

that if I really want to change my life

I might best begin by changing my mind.

Again, none of this is new;

that's why Shakespeare and the Stoics

were telling us this centuries ago,

but Shakespeare never had to face

200 emails in a day. (Laughter)

The Stoics, as far as I know,
were not on Facebook.

We all know that in our on-demand lives,

one of the things that's most on demand

is ourselves.

Wherever we are, any time of night or day,

our bosses, junk-mailers, our parents can get to us.

Sociologists have actually
found that in recent years

Americans are working fewer
hours than 50 years ago,

but we feel as if we're working more.

We have more and more time-saving devices,

but sometimes, it seems, less and less time.

We can more and more easily
make contact with people

on the furthest corners of the planet,

but sometimes in that process

we lose contact with ourselves.

And one of my biggest surprises
as a traveler has been

to find that often it's exactly the people

who have most enabled us to get anywhere

who are intent on going nowhere.

In other words, precisely those
beings who have created

the technologies that override

so many of the limits of old,

are the ones wisest about the need for limits,

even when it comes to technology.

I once went to the Google headquarters

and I saw all the things

many of you have heard about;

the indoor tree houses, the trampolines,

workers at that time enjoying 20 percent

of their paid time free

so that they could just let their
imaginations go wandering.

But what impressed me even more

was that as I was waiting for my digital I.D.,

one Googler was telling me about the program

that he was about to start

to teach the many, many Googlers who

practice yoga to become trainers in it,

and the other Googler was telling me about

the book that he was about to write

on the inner search engine,

and the ways in which science

has empirically shown

that sitting still, or meditation,

can lead not just to better
health or to clearer thinking,

but even to emotional intelligence.

I have another friend in Silicon Valley who is really

one of the most eloquent spokesmen for

the latest technologies, and in fact was

one of the founders of Wired
magazine, Kevin Kelly.

And Kevin wrote his last
book on fresh technologies

without a smartphone or a
laptop or a TV in his home.

And like many in Silicon Valley, he tries really hard

to observe what they call

an Internet sabbath,

whereby for 24 or 48 hours every week

they go completely offline

in order to gather the sense of direction

and proportion they'll need
when they go online again.

The one thing perhaps that technology

hasn't always given us

is a sense of how to make
the wisest use of technology.

And when you speak of the sabbath,

look at the Ten Commandments —

there's only one word there for which

the adjective "holy" is used,

and that's the Sabbath.

I pick up the Jewish holy book of the Torah —

its longest chapter, it's on the Sabbath.

And we all know that it's really

one of our greatest luxuries,

the empty space.

In many a piece of music,
it's the pause or the rest

that gives the piece its beauty and its shape.

And I know I as a writer

will often try to include

a lot of empty space on the page

so that the reader

can complete my thoughts and sentences

and so that her imagination has room to breathe.

Now, in the physical domain,
of course, many people,

if they have the resources,

will try to get a place in the country,

a second home.

I've never begun to have those resources,

but I sometimes remember that any time I want,

I can get a second home in time, if not in space,

just by taking a day off.

And it's never easy because,
of course, whenever I do

I spend much of it

worried about all the extra stuff that's going to

crash down on me the following day.

I sometimes think I'd rather give up

meat or sex or wine than the chance

to check on my emails. (Laughter)

And every season I do try to take

three days off on retreat

but a part of me still feels guilty to be leaving

my poor wife behind and to be

ignoring all those seemingly urgent emails

from my bosses and maybe to be missing

a friend's birthday party.

But as soon as I get to a place of real quiet,

I realize that it's only by going there

that I'll have anything fresh

or creative or joyful to share

with my wife or bosses or friends.

Otherwise, really, I'm just
foisting on them my exhaustion

or my distractedness, which is no blessing at all.

And so when I was 29,

I decided to remake my entire life

in the light of going nowhere.

One evening I was coming back from the office,

it was after midnight, I was in a taxi

driving through Times Square,

and I suddenly realized that I was racing around

so much I could never catch up with my life.

And my life then, as it happened, was

pretty much the one I might have

dreamed of as a little boy.

I had really interesting friends and colleagues,

I had a nice apartment on
Park Avenue and 20th Street.

I had, to me, a fascinating job
writing about world affairs,

but I could never separate
myself enough from them

to hear myself think — or really,

to understand if I was truly happy.

And so, I abandoned my dream life

for a single room on the backstreets

of Kyoto, Japan,

which was the place that
had long exerted a strong,

really mysterious gravitational pull on me.

Even as a child I would just look at a painting

of Kyoto and feel I recognized it;

I knew it before I ever laid eyes on it.

But it's also, as you all know,

a beautiful city encircled by hills,

filled with more than 2,000 temples and shrines,

where people have been sitting
still for 800 years or more.

And quite soon after I moved there,

I ended up where I still am

with my wife, formerly our kids,

in a two-room apartment in the middle of nowhere

where we have no bicycle, no car,

no TV I can understand,

and I still have to support my loved ones

as a travel writer and a journalist,

so clearly this is not ideal for job advancement

or for cultural excitement

or for social diversion.

But I realized that it gives me

what I prize most,

which is days

and hours.

I have never once had to use a cell phone there.

I almost never have to look at the time,

and every morning when I wake up,

really the day stretches in front of me

like an open meadow.

And when life throws up one of its

nasty surprises,

as it will, more than once,

when a doctor comes into my room

wearing a grave expression,

or a car suddenly veers in
front of mine on the freeway,

I know, in my bones,

that it's the time I've spent going nowhere

that is going to sustain me much more

than all the time I've spent

racing around to Bhutan or Easter Island.

I'll always be a traveler —

my livelihood depends on it —

but one of the beauties of travel

is that it allows you

to bring stillness

into the motion and the commotion

of the world.

I once got on a plane in Frankfurt, Germany,

and a young German woman
came down and sat next to me

and engaged me in very friendly conversation

for about 30 minutes,

and then she just turned around

and sat still for 12 hours.

She didn't once turn on her video monitor,

she never pulled out a book,

she didn't even go to sleep,

she just sat still,

and something of her clarity and calm

really imparted itself to me.

I've noticed more and more people taking

conscious measures these days

to try to open up a space

inside their lives.

Some people go to black-hole resorts

where they'll spend hundreds of dollars a night

in order to hand over their cell phone

and their laptop

to the front desk on arrival.

Some people I know, just before they go to sleep,

instead of scrolling through their messages

or checking out YouTube,

just turn out the lights and listen to some music,

and notice that they sleep much better

and wake up much refreshed.

I was once fortunate enough to drive

into the high, dark mountains behind Los Angeles,

where the great poet and singer

and international heartthrob Leonard Cohen

was living and working for many years

as a full-time monk

in the Mount Baldy Zen Center.

And I wasn't entirely surprised when the record

that he released at the age of 77,

to which he gave the deliberately
unsexy title of "Old Ideas,"

went to number one in the charts
in 17 nations in the world,

hit the top five in nine others.

Something in us, I think, is crying out

for the sense of intimacy and depth

that we get from people like that.

who take the time and trouble to sit still.

And I think many of have
the sensation, I certainly do,

that we're standing about two inches away

from a huge screen,

and it's noisy and it's crowded

and it's changing with every second,

and that screen is our lives.

And it's only by stepping
back, and then further back,

and holding still,

that we can begin to see

what the canvas means

and to catch the larger picture.

And a few people do that for us by going nowhere.

So, in an age of acceleration,

nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow.

And in an age of distraction,

nothing is so luxurious as paying attention.

And in an age of constant movement,

nothing is so urgent as sitting still.

So you can go on your next vacation

to Paris or Hawaii, or New Orleans;

I bet you'll have a wonderful time.

But, if you want to come back home alive

and full of fresh hope,

in love with the world,

I think you might want to try considering

going nowhere.

Thank you.

(Applause)