Stillness Is the Key

by Ryan Holiday

  When Krishna speaks of the “mind resting in the stillness of the prayer of Yoga,” it is the same thing. The Christians believe that God is that source of stillness in our lives, which extended peace and comfort to us like a river. “Peace! Be still!” Jesus said to the sea, “and the wind ceased and there was a great calm.”

  There is no stillness to the mind that thinks of nothing but itself, nor will there ever be peace for the body and spirit that follow their every urge and value nothing but themselves.

  The progress of science and technology is essential. But for many of us moderns, it has come at the cost of losing the capacity for awe and for acknowledging forces beyond our comprehension. It has deprived us of the ability to access spiritual stillness and piety.

  Are we really to say that a simple peasant who piously believed in God, who worshipped daily in a beautiful cathedral that must have seemed a wondrous glory to the greatness of the Holy Spirit, was worse off than us because he or she lacked our technology or an understanding of evolution? If we told a Zen Buddhist from Japan in the twelfth century that in the future everyone could count on greater wealth and longer lives but that in most cases those gifts would be followed by a feeling of utter purposelessness and dissatisfaction, do you think they would want to trade places with us?

  Because that doesn’t sound like progress.

  In his 1978 commencement address to the students of Harvard, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke of a modern world where all countries—capitalist and communist alike—had been pervaded by a “despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.”

  To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging everything on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.

  Realism is important. Pragmatism and scientism and skepticism are too. They all have their place. But still, you have to believe in something. You just have to. Or else everything is empty and cold.

  The comedian Stephen Colbert survived a tragic childhood guided by a deep and earnest Catholic faith that he maintains to this day (teaching Sunday school well into his show business career). His mother, who bore the brunt of that tragedy when she lost her husband and two sons in a plane crash, was his example. “Try to look at this moment in the light of eternity,” she would tell him. Eternity. Something bigger than us. Something bigger than we can possibly comprehend. Something longer than our tiny humanness naturally considers.

  We could find a similar story for just about every faith.

  It is probably not a coincidence that when one looks back at history and marvels at the incredible adversity and unimaginable difficulty that people made it through, you tend to find that they all had one thing in common: Some kind of belief in a higher deity. An anchor in their lives called faith. They believed an unfailing hand rested on the wheel, and that there was some deeper purpose or meaning behind their suffering even if they couldn’t understand it. It’s not a coincidence that the vast majority of people who did good in the world did too.

  The reformer Martin Luther was called before a tribunal demanding that he recant his beliefs, on threat of denunciation and possibly death. He spent hours in prayer as he waited his turn to testify. He breathed in. He emptied his mind of worry and fear. He spoke. “I cannot and I will not retract, for it is unsafe for a Christian to speak against his conscience. Here I stand, I can do no other; so help me God. Amen.”

  Is it not interesting that the leaders who end up truly tested by turbulent times end up sincerely relying on some measure of faith and belief to get them through difficult times?

  That was the story of Lincoln. Like many smart young people, he was an atheist early in life, but the trials of adulthood, especially the loss of his son and the horrors of the Civil War, turned him into a believer. Kennedy spent most of his life looking down on his parents’ Catholicism . . . but you can bet he was praying as he stood up to the threat of nuclear annihilation.

  Here I stand, I can do no other; so help me God.

  Nihilism is a fragile strategy. It’s always the nihilists who seem to go crazy or kill themselves when life gets hard. (Or, more recently, are so afraid of dying that they obsess about living forever.)

  Why is that? Because the nihilist is forced to wrestle with the immense complexity and difficulty and potential emptiness of life (and death) with nothing but their own mind. This is a comically unfair mismatch.

  Again, when nearly all the wise people of history agree, we should pause and reflect. It’s next to impossible to find an ancient philosophical school that does not talk about a higher power (or higher powers). Not because they had “evidence” of its existence, but because they knew how powerful faith and belief were, how essential they were to the achievement of stillness and inner peace.

  Fundamentalism is different. Epicurus was right—if God exists, why would they possibly want you to be afraid of them? And why would they care what clothes you wear or how many times you pay obeisance to them per day? What interest would they have in monuments or in fearful pleas for forgiveness? At the purest level, the only thing that matters to any father or mother—or any creator—is that their children find peace, find meaning, find purpose. They certainly did not put us on this planet so we could judge, control, or kill each other.

  But this is not the problem most of us are dealing with. Instead we struggle with skepticism, with an egotism that puts us at the center of the universe. That’s why the philosopher Nassim Taleb’s line is so spot on: It’s not that we need to believe that God is great, only that God is greater than us.

  Even if we are the products of evolution and randomness, does this not take us right back to the position of the Stoics? As subjects to the laws of gravity and physics, are we not already accepting a higher, inexplicable power?

  We have so little control of the world around us, so many inexplicable events created this world, that it works out almost exactly the same way as if there was a god.

  The point of this belief is in some ways to override the mind. To quiet it down by putting it in true perspective. The common language for accepting a higher power is about “letting [Him or Her or It] into your heart.” That’s it. This is about rejecting the tyranny of our intellect, of our immediate observational experience, and accepting something bigger, something beyond ourselves.

  Perhaps you’re not ready to do that, to let anything into your heart. That’s okay. There’s no rush.

  Just know that this step is open to you. It’s waiting. And it will help restore you to sanity when you’re ready.

  ENTER RELATIONSHIPS

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

  —SENECA

  After his first marriage fell apart in the 1960s, the songwriter Johnny Cash moved from Southern California to Tennessee. On the first night in his new home, lonely and depressed, he began to pace the length of the ground floor. It was an enormous house, all but empty of furniture, wedged between a steep hill on one side and Old Hickory Lake on the other. As he walked from one end of the floor to the other, from the hill to the lake, he began to feel, almost frantically, that something was absent.

  What’s missing? he thought. Where is it? he repeated, over and over again. Had he forgotten to pack something? Was there something he needed to do? What wasn’t right?

  Suddenly, it came to him. It wasn’t something, it was someone. His young daughter, Rosanne. She wasn’t there. She was in California
with her mother. A house without family is no home. Johnny Cash stopped, began to shout her name as loud as he could, and fell to the ground and wept.

  In some sense, it might seem like that is exactly the kind of anguish that philosophy helps us avoid through the cultivation of detachment and indifference to other people. If you don’t make yourself dependent on anyone, if you don’t make yourself vulnerable, you can never lose them and you’ll never be hurt.

  There are people who try to live this way. They take vows of chastity or solitude, or, conversely, try to reduce relationships to their most transactional or minimal form. Or because they have been hurt before, they put up walls. Or because they are so talented, they dedicate themselves exclusively to their work. It is necessary, they say, for they have a higher calling. The Buddha, for instance, walked out on his wife and young son without even saying goodbye, because enlightenment was more important.

  Yes, every individual should make the life choices that are right for them. Still, there is something deeply misguided—and terribly sad—about a solitary existence.

  It is true that relationships take time. They also expose and distract us, cause pain, and cost money.

  We are also nothing without them.

  Bad relationships are common, and good relationships are hard. Should that surprise us? Being close to and connecting with other people challenges every facet of our soul.

  Especially when our inner child is there, acting out. Or we are pulled away by lust and desire. Or our selfishness makes little room for another person.

  The temptations of the world lead us astray, and our tempers hurt the ones we love.

  A good relationship requires us to be virtuous, faithful, present, empathetic, generous, open, and willing to be a part of a larger whole. It requires, in order to create growth, real surrender.

  No one would say that’s easy.

  But rising to this challenge—even attempting to rise to it—transforms us . . . if we let it.

  Anyone can be rich or famous. Only you can be Dad or Mom or Daughter or Son or Soul Mate to the people in your life.

  Relationships come in many forms. Mentor. Protégé. Parent. Child. Spouse. Best friend.

  And even if, as some have argued, maintaining these relationships reduces a person’s material or creative success, might the trade be worth it?

  “Who is there who would wish to be surrounded by all the riches in the world and enjoy every abundance in life and yet not love or be loved by anyone?” was Cicero’s question some two thousand years ago. It echoes on down to us, still true forever.

  Even paragons of stillness struggle with what connection and dependence might mean for their careers. Marina Abramović gave a controversial interview in 2016 where she explained her choice to stay single and not to have children. That would have been a disaster for her art, she said. “One only has limited energy in the body, and I would have had to divide it.”

  Nonsense.

  Nonsense that has been internalized by countless driven and ambitious people.

  How well they would do to take even a cursory look at history and literature. German chancellor Angela Merkel has been tirelessly supported by her husband, a man she has described as vital to her success, and upon whose advice she depends. Gertrude Stein was tirelessly supported by her life partner, Alice B. Toklas. Madame Curie was long cynical about love, until she met Pierre, whom she married and with whom she collaborated and ultimately won a Nobel Prize. What about the dedication to On Liberty, John Stuart Mill’s greatest work, where he calls his wife “inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings”? The rapper J. Cole has said that the best thing he ever did as a musician was become a husband and a father. “There was no better decision I could have made,” he said, “than the discipline I put on myself of having responsibility, having another human being—my wife—that I have to answer to.”

  Stillness is best not sought alone. And, like success, it is best when shared. We all need someone who understands us better than we understand ourselves, if only to keep us honest.

  Relationships are not a productivity hack, though understanding that love and family are not incompatible with any career is a breakthrough. It is also true that the single best decision you can make in life, professionally and personally, is to find a partner who complements and supports you and makes you better and for whom you do the same. Conversely, choosing partners and friends who do the opposite endangers both career and happiness.

  Life without relationships, focused solely on accomplishment, is empty and meaningless (in addition to being precarious and fragile). A life solely about work and doing is terribly out of balance; indeed, it requires constant motion and busyness to keep from falling apart.

  The writer Philip Roth spoke proudly late in life about living alone and being responsible or committed to nothing but his own needs. He once told an interviewer that his lifestyle meant he could be always on call for his work, never having to wait for or on anyone but himself. “I’m like a doctor and it’s an emergency room,” he said. “And I’m the emergency.”

  That may be just about the saddest thing a person has ever said without realizing it.

  Dorothy Day, the Catholic nun, spoke of the long loneliness we all experience, a form of suffering to which the only solution is love and relationships. And yet some people inflict this on themselves on purpose! They deprive themselves of the heaven that is having someone to care about and to care about you in return.

  The world hurls at us so many hurricanes. Those who have decided to go through existence as an island are the most exposed and the most ravaged by the storms and whirlwinds.

  On September 11, 2001, Brian Sweeney was a passenger trapped on hijacked United Airlines Flight 175, which was heading straight for the South Tower of the World Trade Center. He called his wife from one of the plane’s seatback phones to say that things were not looking good. “I want you to know that I absolutely love you,” he told her voicemail. “I want you to do good, have good times, same with my parents. I’ll see you when you get here.”

  Imagine the terror of that moment, yet when you hear his voice coming through the phone, not a trace of fear. The same serene calmness is found in the final letter written by Major Sullivan Ballou in 1861 in the days before his Federal regiment marched out to Manassas, Virginia, where he seemed to know for certain that he would die in battle. “Sarah,” he wrote, “my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables, that nothing but Omnipotence can break; and yet, my love of country comes over me like a strong wind, and bears me irresistibly on with all those chains, to the battlefield. The memories of all the blissful moments I have spent with you come crowding over me, and I feel most deeply grateful to God and you, that I have enjoyed them so long.”

  Fyodor Dostoevsky once described his wife, Anna, as a rock on which he could lean and rest, a wall that would not let him fall and protected him from the cold. There is no better description of love, between spouses or friends or parent and child, than that. Love, Freud said, is the great educator. We learn when we give it. We learn when we get it. We get closer to stillness through it.

  Like all good education, it is not easy. Not easy at all.

  It’s been said that the word “love” is spelled T-I-M-E. It is also spelled W-O-R-K and S-A-C-R-I-F-I-C-E and D-I-F-F-I-C-U-L-T-Y, C-O-M-M-I-T-M-E-N-T, and occasionally M-A-D-N-E-S-S.

  But it is always punctuated by R-E-W-A-R-D. Even ones that end.

  The stillness of two people on a porch swing, the stillness of a hug, of a final letter, of a memory, a phone call before a plane crash, of paying it forward, of teaching, of learning, of being together.

  The notion that isolation, that total self-driven focus, will get you to a supreme state of enlightenment is not only incorrect, it misses the obvious: Who will even care that you did all that? Your house might be quieter without
kids and it might be easier to work longer hours without someone waiting for you at the dinner table, but it is a hollow quiet and an empty ease.

  To go through our days looking out for no one but ourselves? To think that we can or must do this all alone? To accrue mastery or genius, wealth or power, solely for our own benefit? What is the point?

  By ourselves, we are a fraction of what we can be.

  By ourselves, something is missing, and, worse, we feel that in our bones.

  Which is why stillness requires other people; indeed, it is for other people.

  CONQUER YOUR ANGER

  He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.

  —PROVERBS 16:32

  In 2009, Michael Jordan was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. It was the crowning achievement of a magnificent career that included six NBA championships, fourteen trips to the All-Star Game, two Olympic gold medals, and the highest scoring average in the history of the sport.

  Ascending the stage in a silver suit, with his trademark single hoop earring, Michael was in tears from the start. He joked that his initial plan had been to simply accept the honor, say thank you, and then return to his seat. But he couldn’t do it.

  He had something he wanted to say.

  What ensued was a strange and surreal speech where Michael Jordan, a man with nothing to prove and so much to be thankful for, spent nearly a half hour listing and responding to every slight he’d ever received in his career. Standing at the podium, in a tone that feigned lightheartedness but was clearly deeply felt and deeply angry, he complained of media naysayers, and of how his college coach at North Carolina, Dean Smith, had not touted him as a promising freshman in a 1981 interview with Sports Illustrated. He even noted how much he spent on tickets for his children for the ceremony.