In his adventuresome books Sun After Dark and in The Global Soul, Pico Iyer, a British-born essayist and novelist based in California, shared his exciting and exotic travels to every corner of the Earth. But after decades of such hustle and bustle and movement, he sought some downtime at a Benedictine retreat in northern California where he practiced meditation and garnered new respect for the art of attention.
In this collection of essays, he shares some of the fruits of stillness. In a meeting with singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, who has been called by many the poet laurate of the road, Iyer is pleased to learn that after five years of seclusion at Mt. Baldy Zen Center, his boyhood hero feels the same way about Zen sitting, calling it "the real deep entertainment" and "the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence." In his cogent assessments of two other cloistered artists, Marcel Proust and Emily Dickinson, Iyer reveals how stillness enables him to be attentive to all that goes on around and inside him. As he puts it, sitting still is "a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it."
The author finds delight in sitting still in his doll's house apartment in Kyoto, Japan, where he and his wife have no bedroom or TV or car. On living in "a madly accelerating world," Iyer concludes:
"In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than slowing down.
"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.
"You can go on vacation to Paris or Hawaii or New Orleans three months from now, and you'll have a tremendous time, I'm sure. But if you want to come back feeling new — alive and full of fresh hope and in love with the world — I think the place to visit may be Nowhere."
