Stillness Is the Key

Ryan Holiday

The Buddhist word for it was upekkha. The Muslims spoke of aslama. The Hebrews, hishtavut. The second book of the Bhagavad Gita, the epic poem of the warrior Arjuna, speaks of samatvam, an “evenness of mind—a peace that is ever the same.” The Greeks, euthymia and hesychia. The Epicureans, ataraxia. The Christians, aequanimitas. In English: stillness.

• To be steady while the world spins around you. To act without frenzy. To hear only what needs to be heard. To possess quietude—exterior and interior—on command.
• Stillness is what aims the archer’s arrow. It inspires new ideas. It sharpens perspective and illuminates connections. It slows the ball down so that we might hit it. It generates a vision, helps us resist the passions of the mob, makes space for gratitude and wonder. Stillness allows us to persevere. To succeed. It is the key that unlocks the insights of genius, and allows us regular folks to understand them.

PART I MIND ♦ SPIRIT ♦ BODY

The mind is restless, Krishna, impetuous, self-willed, hard to train: to master the mind seems as difficult as to master the mighty winds. —THE BHAGAVAD GITA

• Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save face. Put yourself in his shoes—so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil—nothing is so self-blinding.
• Careful as someone crossing an iced-over stream. Alert as a warrior in enemy territory. Courteous as a guest. Fluid as melting ice. Shapeable as a block of wood. Receptive as a valley. Clear as a glass of water.
• In these situations we must: Be fully present. Empty our mind of preconceptions. Take our time. Sit quietly and reflect. Reject distraction. Weigh advice against the counsel of our convictions. Deliberate without being paralyzed.
• The lesson was one not of force but of the power of patience, alternating confidence and humility, foresight and presence, empathy and unbending conviction, restraint and toughness, and quiet solitude combined with wise counsel.
• We are not present . . . and so we miss out. On life. On being our best. On seeing what’s there.
• How much ordinary wonderfulness they closed their minds to.
• Remember, there’s no greatness in the future. Or clarity. Or insight. Or happiness. Or peace. There is only this moment. The less energy we waste regretting the past or worrying about the future, the more energy we will have for what’s in front of us.
• This moment we are experiencing right now is a gift (that’s why we call it the present). Even if it is a stressful, trying experience—it could be our last. So let’s develop the ability to be in it, to put everything we have into appreciating the plentitude of the now.
• Don’t reject a difficult or boring moment because it is not exactly what you want. Don’t waste a beautiful moment because you are insecure or shy. Make what you can of what you have been given. Live what can be lived. That’s what excellence is. That’s what presence makes possible.

LIMIT YOUR INPUTS 

• A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. —HERBERT SIMON
• As a general, Napoleon made it his habit to delay responding to the mail. His secretary was instructed to wait three weeks before opening any correspondence. When he finally did hear what was in a letter, Napoleon loved to note how many supposedly “important” issues had simply resolved themselves and no longer required a reply.
  • Napoleon was content with being behind on his mail, even if it upset some people or if he missed out on some gossip, because it meant that trivial problems had to resolve themselves without him.
• In order to think clearly, it is essential that each of us figures out how to filter out the inconsequential from the essential. It’s not enough to be inclined toward deep thought and sober analysis; a leader must create time and space for it.
• “If you wish to improve,” Epictetus once said, “be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.”
• The important stuff will still be important by the time you get to it. The unimportant will have made its insignificance obvious (or simply disappeared). Then, with stillness rather than needless urgency or exhaustion, you will be able to sit down and give what deserves consideration your full attention.
• Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, “Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?’”
• Thich Nhat Hanh: Before we can make deep changes in our lives, we have to look into our diet, our way of consuming. We have to live in such a way that we stop consuming the things that poison us and intoxicate us. Then we will have the strength to allow the best in us to arise, and we will no longer be victims of anger, of frustration.
• No pressure. Just presence. Just happy to be there.
• “I began a lifelong search for what is essential,” he said about his childhood, “what it is about my neighbor that doesn’t meet the eye.” He even framed a print of that idea on the wall of his production studio in Pittsburgh, a snippet from one of his favorite quotes: L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. What’s essential is invisible to the eye.
  • That is: Appearances are misleading. First impressions are too. We are disturbed and deceived by what’s on the surface, by what others see. Then we make bad decisions, miss opportunities, or feel scared or upset. Particularly when we don’t slow down and take the time to really look.
  • “Just think,” Rogers once wrote to a struggling friend. “Just be quiet and think. It’ll make all the difference in the world.”

• “Suddenly,” Hakuin promised his students, “unexpectedly your teeth sink in. Your body will pour with cold sweat. At the instant, it will all become clear.” The word for this was satori—an illuminating insight when the inscrutable is revealed, when an essential truth becomes obvious and inescapable.

Journaling 

• Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, seems to have done his writing and reflection in the evenings, much along the lines of Anne Frank’s practice. When darkness had fallen and his wife had gone to sleep, he explained to a friend, “I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.” Then he would go to bed, finding that “the sleep which follows this self-examination” was particularly sweet. Anyone who reads him today can feel him reaching for stillness in these nightly writings.
• Michel Foucault talked of the ancient genre of hupomnemata (notes to oneself). He called the journal a “weapon for spiritual combat,” a way to practice philosophy and purge the mind of agitation and foolishness and to overcome difficulty. To silence the barking dogs in your head. To prepare for the day ahead. To reflect on the day that has passed. Take note of insights you’ve heard. Take the time to feel wisdom flow through your fingertips and onto the page.
• Journaling is a way to ask tough questions: 
  • Where am I standing in my own way? 
  • What’s the smallest step I can take toward a big thing today? 
  • Why am I so worked up about this? 
  • What blessings can I count right now? 
  • Why do I care so much about impressing people? 
  • What is the harder choice I’m avoiding? 
  • Do I rule my fears, or do they rule me? 
  • How will today’s difficulties reveal my character?*

• That is what journaling is about. It’s spiritual windshield wipers, as the writer Julia Cameron once put it. It’s a few minutes of reflection that both demands and creates stillness.

Randall Stutman, who for decades has been the behind-the-scenes advisor for many of the biggest CEOs and leaders on Wall Street, once studied how several hundred senior executives of major corporations recharged in their downtime. The answers were things like sailing, long-distance cycling, listening quietly to classical music, scuba diving, riding motorcycles, and fly-fishing. All these activities, he noticed, had one thing in common: an absence of voices.

 

Wisdom 

Imperturbable wisdom is worth everything. —DEMOCRITUS

• Diogenes Laërtius would write that what made Socrates so wise was that “he knew nothing except just the fact of his ignorance.” Better still, he was aware of what he did not know and was always willing to be proven wrong.
• He was constantly probing other people’s views. 
  • Why do you think that? 
  • How do you know? 
  • What evidence do you have? 
  • But what about this or that? 
  • This open-minded search for truth, for wisdom, was what made Socrates the most brilliant and challenging man in Athens—so much so that they later killed him for it.

• All philosophical schools preach the need for wisdom. The Hebrew word for wisdom is (chokmâh); the corresponding term in Islam is ḥikma, and both cultures believe that God was an endless source of it. The Greek word for wisdom was sophia, which in Latin became sapientia (and why man is called Homo sapiens).
• Both the Epicureans and the Stoics held sophia up as a core tenet. In their view, wisdom was gained through experience and study. Jesus advised his followers to be as wise as snakes and as innocent as doves. Proverbs 4:7 holds acquiring wisdom to be the most important thing people can do.
• The Buddhists refer to wisdom as prajñā, and took wisdom to mean the understanding of the true nature of reality.
• Each school has its own take on wisdom, but the same themes appear in all of them: The need to ask questions. The need to study and reflect. The importance of intellectual humility. The power of experiences—most of all failure and mistakes—to open our eyes to truth and understanding. In this way, wisdom is a sense of the big picture, the accumulation of experience and the ability to rise above the biases, the traps that catch lazier thinkers.
• Tolstoy expressed his exasperation at people who didn’t read deeply and regularly. “I cannot understand,” he said, “how some people can live without communicating with the wisest people who ever lived on earth.” There’s another line, now cliché, that is even more cutting: People who don’t read have no advantage over those who cannot read.
  • William Somerset: Gentlemen, gentlemen… I’ll never understand. All these books, a world of knowledge at your fingertips. What do you do? You play poker all night.- the movie Seven 
• We must also seek mentors and teachers who can guide us in our journey. Stoicism, for instance, was founded when Zeno, then a successful merchant, first heard someone reading the teachings of Socrates out loud in a bookstore. But that wasn’t enough. What he did next was what put him on the path to wisdom, for he walked up to the person reading and said, “Where can I find a man like that?” In Buddhism, there is the idea of pabbajja, which means “to go forth” and marks the serious beginning of one’s studies. That’s what Zeno was doing. Answering the call and going forth.

Wrestle with big questions. Wrestle with big ideas. Treat your brain like the muscle that it is. Get stronger through resistance and exposure and training.

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it. —COLIN POWELL

• Confident people know what matters. They know when to ignore other people’s opinions. They don’t boast or lie to get ahead (and then struggle to deliver). Confidence is the freedom to set your own standards and unshackle yourself from the need to prove yourself.

Work done for a reward is much lower than work done in the Yoga of wisdom. Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward. Work not for the reward; but never cease to do thy work. —THE BHAGAVAD GITA

• He preferred instead to teach his students an important mental skill: detachment. “What stands in your way,” Kenzo once told his student Eugen Herrigel, “is that you have too much willful will.” It was this willful will—the desire to be in control and to dictate the schedule and the process of everything we’re a part of—that held Herrigel back from learning, from really mastering the art he pursued.
• What Kenzo wanted students to do was to put the thought of hitting the target out of their minds. He wanted them to detach even from the idea of an outcome. “The hits on the target,” he would say, “are only the outward proof and confirmation of your purposelessness at its highest, of your egolessness, your self-abandonment, or whatever you like to call this state.”
• Stillness, then, is actually a way to superior performance. Looseness will give you more control than gripping tightly—to a method or a specific outcome. Obviously an archery master
• What we need in life, in the arts, in sports, is to loosen up, to become flexible, to get to a place where there is nothing in our way—including our own obsession with certain outcomes.
• In Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism, the lotus flower is a powerful symbol. Although it rises out of the mud of a pond or a river, it doesn’t reach up towering into the sky—it floats freely, serenely on top of the water. It was said that wherever Buddha walked, lotus flowers appeared to mark his footprints. In a way, the lotus also embodies the principle of letting go. It’s beautiful and pure, but also attainable and lowly. It is simultaneously attached and detached.

If the mind is disciplined, the heart turns quickly from fear to love. —JOHN CAGE

Most of us would be seized with fear if our bodies went numb, and would do everything possible to avoid it, yet we take no interest at all in the numbing of our souls. —EPICTETUS

• That is why those who seek stillness must come to . . . Develop a strong moral compass. Steer clear of envy and jealousy and harmful desires. Come to terms with the painful wounds of their childhood. Practice gratitude and appreciation for the world around them. Cultivate relationships and love in their lives. Place belief and control in the hands of something larger than themselves. Understand that there will never be “enough” and that the unchecked pursuit of more ends only in bankruptcy.

Virtue 

• Marcus Aurelius famously described a number of what he called “epithets for the self.” Among his were: Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. These were, then, the traits that served him well as emperor. There are many other traits that could be added to this list: Honest. Patient. Caring. Kind. Brave. Calm. Firm. Generous. Forgiving. Righteous. There is one word, however, under which all these epithets sit: virtue.
• Virtue, the Stoics believed, was the highest good—the summum bonum—and should be the principle behind all our actions. Virtue is not holiness, but rather moral and civic excellence in the course of daily life. It’s a sense of pure rightness that emerges from our souls and is made real through the actions we take.
• The East prized virtue as much as the West. The Daodejing, for instance, actually translates as The Way of Virtue. Confucius, who advised many of the rulers and princes of his day, would have agreed with Marcus that a leader was well served by the pursuit of virtue. His highest compliment would have been to call a ruler a junzi—a word that translators still have trouble finding equivalents for in English but is roughly understood as a person who emanates integrity, honor, and self-control.
• Different situations naturally call for different virtues and different epithets for the self. When we’re going into a tough assignment, we can say to ourselves over and over again, “Strength and courage.” Before a tough conversation with a significant other: “Patience and kindness.” In times of corruption and evil: “Goodness and honesty.”
• Which is why each of us needs to sit down and examine ourselves. 
  • What do we stand for? 
  • What do we believe to be essential and important? 
  • What are we really living for? 
  • Deep in the marrow of our bones, in the chambers of our heart, we know the answer. The problem is that the busyness of life, the realities of pursuing a career and surviving in the world, come between us and that self-knowledge.

• Each of us must cultivate a moral code, a higher standard that we love almost more than life itself. Each of us must sit down and ask: 
  • What’s important to me? 
  • What would I rather die for than betray? 
  • How am I going to live and why?
  • What will happen to me if I get what I want? 
  • How will I feel after?

• To have an impulse and to resist it, to sit with it and examine it, to let it pass by like a bad smell—this is how we develop spiritual strength. This is how we become who we want to be in this world. Only those of us who take the time to explore, to question, to extrapolate the consequences of our desires have an opportunity to overcome them and to stop regrets before they start. Only they know that real pleasure lies in having a soul that’s true and stable, happy and secure.
• It occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.
• Most people never learn that their accomplishments will ultimately fail to provide the relief and happiness we tell ourselves they will. Or they come to understand this only after so much time and money, so many relationships and moments of inner peace, were sacrificed on the altar of achievement. We get to the finish line only to think: This is it? Now what?
• No one achieves excellence or enlightenment without a desire to get better, without a tendency to explore potential areas of improvement. Yet the desire—or the need—for more is often at odds with happiness. Billie Jean King, the tennis great, has spoken about this, about how the mentality that gets an athlete to the top so often prevents them from enjoying the thing they worked so hard for. The need for progress can be the enemy of enjoying the process.

The Daodejing: The greatest misfortune is to not know contentment. The word calamity is the desire to acquire. And so those who know the contentment of contentment are always content.

• The Western philosophers wrestled with the balance between getting more and being satisfied. Epicurus: “Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.”
• Thomas Traherne: “To have blessings and to prize them is to be in Heaven; to have them and not to prize them is to be in Hell. . . . To prize them and not to have them is to be in Hell.”

Temperance. That’s the key.

• More does nothing for the one who feels less than, who cannot see the wealth that was given to them at birth, that they have accumulated in their relationships and experiences.
• What do we want more of in life? That’s the question. It’s not accomplishments. It’s not popularity. It’s moments when we feel like we are enough. More presence. More clarity. More insight. More truth. More stillness.

BATHE IN BEAUTY

 In the face of the Sublime, we feel a shiver . . . something too large for our minds to encompass. And for a moment, it shakes us out of our smugness and releases us from the deathlike grip of habit and banality. —ROBERT GREENE

• “Beauty remains, even in misfortune,” she wrote. “If you just look for it, you discover more and more happiness and regain your balance.”
• The term for this is exstasis—a heavenly experience that lets us step outside ourselves. And these beautiful moments are available to us whenever we want them. All we have to do is open our souls to them.
• The Japanese have a concept, shinrin yoku—forest bathing

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself. —ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

• While addiction is undoubtedly a biological disease, it is also, in a more practical sense, a process of becoming obsessed with one’s own self and the primacy of one’s urges and thoughts. Therefore, admitting that there is something bigger than you out there is an important breakthrough. It means an addict finally understands that they are not God, that they are not in control, and really never have been. By the way, none of us are.

ENTER RELATIONSHIPS 

There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with. —SENECA

• The Buddha, for instance, walked out on his wife and young son without even saying goodbye, because enlightenment was more important.

As a well-spent day brings a happy sleep, so a well-employed life brings a happy death. —LEONARDO DA VINCI