by Ryan Holiday
Examining our souls is not as easy as clearing our minds, you’ll find. It requires that we peel back what the writer Mark Manson has called the “self-awareness onion” and take responsibility for our own emotions and impulses. Anyone who’s done it can tell you that tears and onions often go together.
But it’s precisely this soft stuff—getting in touch with ourselves, finding balance and meaning, cultivating virtue—that the volleyball champion Kerri Walsh Jennings has said makes her such a killer on the court.
Some ancient traditions have held that the soul is in the belly, which is fitting for two reasons. Because we’ve just been through the belly of the beast part of our journey, and because it sets up where we go next.
Stillness isn’t merely an abstraction—something we only think about or feel. It’s also real. It’s in our bodies. Seneca warned us not to “suppose that the soul is at peace when the body is still.” Vice versa. Lao Tzu said that “movement is the foundation of stillness.”
What follows then is the final domain of stillness. The literal form that our form takes in the course of day-to-day life. Our bodies (where, you must not forget, the heart and the brain are both located). The environment we put those bodies in. The habits and routines to which we subject that body.
A body that is overworked or abused is not only actually not still, it creates turbulence that ripples through the rest of our lives. A mind that is overtaxed and ill-treated is susceptible to vice and corruption. A spoiled, lazy existence is the manifestation of spiritual emptiness. We can be active, we can be on the move, and still be still. Indeed, we have to be active for the stillness to have any meaning.
Life is hard. Fortune is fickle. We can’t afford to be weak. We can’t afford to be fragile. We must strengthen our bodies as the physical vessel for our minds and spirit, subject to the capriciousness of the physical world.
Which is why we now move on to this final domain of stillness—the body—and its place in the real world. In real life.
PART III
MIND ♦ SPIRIT ♦ BODY
We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
THE DOMAIN OF THE BODY
Winston Churchill had a productive life.
He first saw combat at age twenty-one, and wrote his first bestselling book about it not long after. By twenty-six, he’d been elected to public office and would serve in government for the next six and half decades. He’d write some ten million words and over forty books, paint more than five hundred paintings, and give some twenty-three hundred speeches in the course of his time on this planet. In between all that, he managed to hold the positions of minister of defense, first lord of the admiralty, chancellor of the exchequer, and of course, prime minister of Britain, where he helped save the world from the Nazi menace. Then, to top it off, he spent his twilight years fighting the totalitarian communist menace.
“It is a pushing age,” Churchill wrote his mother as a young man, “and we must shove with the rest.” It may well be that Winston Churchill was the greatest pusher in all of history. His life spanned the final cavalry charge of the British Empire, which he witnessed as a young war correspondent in 1898, and ended well into the nuclear age, indeed the space age, both of which he helped usher in. His first trip to America was on a steamship (to be introduced on stage by Mark Twain, no less), and his final one on a Boeing 707 that flew at 500 miles per hour. In between he saw two world wars, the invention of the car, radio, and rock and roll, and countless trials and triumphs.
Is there stillness to be found here? Could someone that active, so Herculean in their labors, who embraced so much strife and stress, ever be described as still, or at peace?
Strangely, yes.
As Paul Johnson, one of Churchill’s best biographers, would write, “The balance he maintained between flat-out work and creative and restorative leisure is worth study by anyone holding a top position.” Johnson as a seventeen-year-old, decades before his own career as a writer, met Churchill on the street and shouted to him, “Sir, to what do you attribute your success in life?”
Immediately, Churchill replied, “Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.”
Churchill conserved his energy so that he never shirked from a task, or backed down from a challenge. So that, for all this work and pushing, he never burned himself out or snuffed out the spark of joy that made life worth living. (Indeed, in addition to the importance of hard work, Johnson said the other four lessons from Churchill’s remarkable life were to aim high; to never allow mistakes or criticism to get you down; to waste no energy on grudges, duplicity, or infighting; and to make room for joy.) Even during the war, Churchill never lost his sense of humor, never lost sight of what was beautiful in the world, and never became jaded or cynical.
Different traditions offer different prescriptions for the good life. The Stoics urged determination and iron self-will. The Epicureans preached relaxation and simple pleasures. The Christians spoke of saving mankind and glorifying God. The French, a certain joie de vivre. The happiest and most resilient of us manage to incorporate a little of each each of these approaches into our lives, and that was certainly true of Churchill. He was a man of great discipline and passion. He was a soldier. He was a lover of books, a believer in glory and honor. A statesman, a literal bricklayer, and a painter. We are all worms, he once joked to a friend, simple organisms that eat and defecate and then die, but he liked to think of himself as a glowworm.
In addition to his impressive mental abilities and spiritual strength, Churchill was also an unexpected—given his portly frame—master of the third and final domain of stillness, the physical one.
Few would have predicted he would distinguish himself here. Born with a frail constitution, Churchill complained as a young man that he was “cursed with so feeble a body that I can hardly support the fatigues of the day.” Yet like Theodore Roosevelt before him, he cultivated inside this frail body an indomitable soul and a determined mind that overcame his physical limitations.
It’s a balance that everyone aspiring to sustained inner peace must strike. Mens sana in corpore sano—a strong mind in a strong body. Remember, when we say that someone “showed so much heart,” we don’t mean emotion. We mean they had tenacity and grit. The metaphor is actually misleading if you think about it. It’s really the spine—the backbone of body—that’s doing the work.
Young Churchill loved the written word, but, diverging from the traditional path of a writer, he didn’t lock himself up with books in a dusty old library. He put his body into action. Serving in or observing three straight wars, he made his name chronicling the exploits of the empire, first as a war correspondent in South Africa during the Boer War, where he was taken prisoner in 1899 and barely escaped with his life.
In 1900, he was elected to his first political office. By age thirty-three, realizing that greatness was impossible alone, he committed his body to another. He married his wife, Clementine, a brilliant, calming influence who balanced out many of his worst traits. It was one of the great marriages of the age—they called each other “Pug” and “Cat”—marked by true affection and love. “My ability to persuade my wife to marry me,” he said, was “quite my most brilliant achievement. . . . Of course, it would have been impossible for any ordinary man to have got through what I had to go through in peace and war without the devoted aid of what we call, in England, one’s better half.”
As busy and ambitious as Churchill was—as much of a pusher as he was—he was rarely frantic and did not tolerate disorganization. It almost ruins the fun to learn that Churchill’s infamous bons mots and one-liners were in fact well-practiced and rehearsed. No one knew the effort that went into them, he said, nor the effort that went into making them look effortless. “Every night,” he said, “I try myself by court mar
tial to see if I have done anything effective during the day. I don’t mean just pawing the ground—anyone can go through the motions—but something really effective.”
As a writer, he was gaspingly productive. While holding political office, Churchill managed to publish seven books between 1898 and the end of World War I alone. How did he do it? How did he manage to pull so much out of himself? The simple answer: physical routine.
Each morning, Churchill got up around eight and took his first bath, which he entered at 98 degrees and had cranked up to 104 while he sat (and occasionally somersaulted) in the water. Freshly bathed, he would spend the next two hours reading. Then he responded to his daily mail, mostly pertaining to his political duties. Around noon he’d stop in to say hello to his wife for the first time—believing all his life that the secret to a happy marriage was that spouses should not see each other before noon. Then he tackled whatever writing project he was working on—likely an article or a speech or a book. By early afternoon he would be writing at a fantastic clip and then abruptly stop for lunch (which he would finally dress for). After lunch, he would go for a walk around Chartwell, his estate in the English countryside, feeding his swans and fish—to him the most important and enjoyable part of the day. Then he would sit on the porch and take in the air, thinking and musing. For inspiration and serenity he might recite poetry to himself. At 3 p.m., it was time for a two-hour nap. After the nap, it was family time and then a second bath before a late, seated and formal dinner (after 8 p.m.). After dinner and drinks, one more writing sprint before bed.
It was a routine he would stick to even on Christmas.
Churchill was a hard worker and a man of discipline—but like us, he was not perfect. He often worked more than he should have, usually because he spent more money than he needed to (and it produced a fair bit of writing that would have better remained unpublished). Churchill was impetuous, liked to gamble, and was prone to overcommit. It wasn’t from the tireless execution of his wartime duties that he was inspired to depict himself once, in a drawing, as a pig carrying a twenty-thousand-pound weight. It was his indulgences that produced that.
Nor was his life an endless series of triumphs. Churchill made many mistakes, usually lapses of judgment that came from a mind fried by stress. Thus, he emerged from World War I with a mixed record. His service in the wartime administration had been marked by some major failures, but he had redeemed himself by resigning and serving on the front lines with the Royal Scots Fusiliers. After the war, he was called back to serve as secretary of state for war and air and then secretary of state for the colonies.
The mid-1920s saw Churchill serving as chancellor of the exchequer (a position in which he was in way over his head), while having also signed a contract to produce a six-volume, three-thousand-page account of the war, titled The World Crisis. Left to his own devices, he might have tried to white-knuckle this incredible workload. But those around him saw the toll that his responsibilities were taking and, worried about burnout, urged him to find a hobby that might offer him a modicum of pleasure and enjoyment and rest. “Do remember what I said about resting from current problems,” Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin wrote to him. “A big year will soon begin and much depends on your keeping fit.”
In typical Churchillian fashion, he chose an unexpected form of leisure: bricklaying. Taught the craft by two employees at Chartwell, he immediately fell in love with the slow, methodical process of mixing mortar, troweling, and stacking bricks. Unlike his other professions, writing and politics, bricklaying didn’t wear down his body, it invigorated him. Churchill could lay as many as ninety bricks an hour. As he wrote to the prime minister in 1927, “I have had a delightful month building a cottage and dictating a book: 200 bricks and 2000 words a day.” (He also spent several hours a day on his ministerial duties.) A friend observed how good it was for Churchill to get down on the ground and interact with the earth. This was also precious time he spent with his youngest daughter, Sarah, who dutifully carried the bricks for her father as his cute and well-loved apprentice.
A dark moment in World War I had inspired another hobby—oil painting. He was introduced to it by his sister-in-law, who, sensing that Churchill was a steaming kettle of stress, handed him a small kit of paints and brushes her young children liked to play with. In a little book titled Painting as a Pastime, Churchill spoke eloquently of a reliance on new activities that use other parts of our minds and bodies to relieve the areas where we are overworked. “The cultivation of a hobby and new forms of interest is therefore a policy of first importance to a public man,” he wrote. “To be really happy and really safe, one ought to have at least two or three hobbies, and they must all be real.”
Churchill was not a particularly good painter (his bricklaying was often corrected by professionals too), but even a glance at his pictures reveals how much he enjoyed himself as he worked. It’s palpable in the brushstrokes. “Just to paint is great fun,” he would say. “The colors are lovely to look at and delicious to squeeze out.” Early on, Churchill was advised by a well-known painter never to hesitate in front of the canvas (that is to say, overthink), and he took it to heart. He wasn’t intimidated or discouraged by his lack of skill (only this could explain the audacity it took for him to add a mouse to a priceless Peter Paul Rubens painting that hung in one of the prime minister’s residences). Painting was about expression of joy for Churchill. It was leisure, not work.
Painting, like all good hobbies, taught the practitioner to be present. “This heightened sense of observation of Nature,” he wrote, “is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint.” He had lived for forty years on planet Earth consumed by his work and his ambition, but through painting, his perspective and perception grew much sharper. Forced to slow down to set up his easel, to mix his paints, to wait for them to dry, he saw things he would have previously blown right past.
This was a skill that he actively cultivated—increasing his mental awareness by way of physical exercises. Churchill started going to museums to look at paintings, then he’d wait a day and try to re-create them from memory. Or he’d try to capture a landscape he had seen after he had left it. (This was similar to his habit of reciting poetry aloud.) “Painting challenged his intellect, appealed to his sense of beauty and proportion, unleashed his creative impulse, and . . . brought him peace,” remarked his lifelong friend Violet Bonham Carter. It was also, she said, the only thing Churchill ever did silently. His other daughter, Mary, observed that painting and manual labor “were the sovereign antidotes to the depressive element in his nature.” Churchill was happy because he got out of his own head and put his body to work.
How necessary this turned out to be, because in 1929 his stunning political career suddenly came to what appeared to be an ignominious end. Driven from political life, Churchill spent a decade in pseudo-exile at Chartwell, while Neville Chamberlain and a generation of British politicians appeased the growing threat of Fascism in Europe.
Life does that to us. It kicks our ass. Everything we work for can be taken away. All our powers can be rendered impotent in a moment. What follows this is not just an issue of spirit or the mind, it’s a real physical question: What do you do with your time? How do you handle the stress of the whiplash?
Marcus Aurelius’s answer was that in these situations one must “love the discipline you know and let it support you.” In 1915, reeling from the failure of the Gallipoli campaign, Churchill wrote of feeling like a “sea-beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure. I had great anxiety and no means of relieving it; I had vehement convictions and small power to give effect to them.” It was then that he picked up painting, and in 1929, experiencing a similar loss in cabin pressure, he returned to his discipline and his hobbies for relief and for reflection.
Churchill didn’t know it in the middle of the 1930s, but being out of power
during Germany’s rearmament was exactly the right place to be. It would take real strength to stay there, to not fight his way back in, but if he had, he would have been sullied by the incompetence of his peers in the government. Churchill was likely one of the only British leaders to take the time to sit through and digest Hitler’s Mein Kampf (if Chamberlain had, perhaps Hitler could have been stopped sooner). This time allowed Churchill to actively pursue his writing and radio careers, which made him a beloved celebrity in America (and primed the country for its eventual alliance with Britain). He spent time with his goldfish and his children and his oils.
Also, he had to wait. For the first time in his life, excepting those afternoons on the porch, he had to do nothing.
Would Churchill have been the outsider called back to lead Britain in its finest hour had he allowed the indignity of his political exile to overwhelm his mind, burrow into his soul, and compel him to fight his way back into the limelight in those years? Could he have had the energy and strength at age sixty-six to put the country on his back and lead without that supposedly “lost” decade? If he had kept up his breakneck pace?
Almost certainly not.
Churchill himself would write that every prophet must be forced into the wilderness—where they undergo solitude, deprivation, reflection, and meditation. It’s from this physical ordeal he said that “psychic dynamite” is made. When Churchill was recalled, he was ready. He was rested. He could see what no one else could or would. Everyone else cowered in fear of Hitler, but Churchill did not.
Instead, he fought. He stood alone. As he said to the House of Commons:
Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
