Stillness Is the Key

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.

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.” The gift of free will is that in this life we can choose to be good or we can choose to be bad. We can choose what standards to hold ourselves to and what we will regard as important, honorable, and admirable. The choices we make in that regard determine whether we will experience peace or not. 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.

After recognizing and embracing our inner child, the third function of mindfulness is to soothe and relieve our difficult emotions. Just by holding this child gently, we are soothing our difficult emotions and we can begin to feel at ease. When we embrace our strong emotions with mindfulness and concentration, we’ll be able to see the roots of these mental formations. We’ll know where our suffering has come from. When we see the roots of things, our suffering will lessen. So mindfulness recognizes, embraces, and relieves.

We can also rely on tools to help us resist harmful desires. Saint Athanasius of Alexandria wrote in his Vita Antonii that one of the benefits of journaling—Confessions, as the Christians called the genre—was that it helped stop him from sinning. By observing and then writing about his own behavior, he was able to hold himself accountable and make himself better:

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.

“I’ve got something he can never have,” Heller replied. “And what on earth could that be?” Vonnegut asked. “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

Imagine the stillness that sense of enough brought Joseph Heller and everyone else who has it. No ceaseless wanting. No insecurity of comparison. Feeling satisfied with yourself and your work? What gift!

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 of progress can be the enemy of enjoying the process.

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.

You will never feel okay by way of external accomplishments. Enough comes from the inside. It comes from stepping off the train. From seeing what you already have, what you’ve always had. If a person can do that, they are richer than any billionaire, more powerful than any sovereign.

It’s perfectly possible to do and make good work from a good place. You can be healthy and still and successful. Joseph Heller believed he had enough, but he still kept writing. He wrote six novels after Catch-22

Not that all beauty is so immediately beautiful. We’re not always on the farm or at the beach or gazing out over sweeping canyon views. Which is why the philosopher must cultivate the poet’s eye—the ability to see beauty everywhere, even in the banal or the terrible.

Robert Greene, known for his amoral study of power and seduction, actually writes in his book The Laws of Human Nature about the need to practice mitfreude, the active wishing of goodwill to other people, instead of schadenfreude, the active wishing of ill will. We can make an active effort to practice forgiveness, especially to those who might have caused those inner-child wounds we have worked to heal. We can seek understanding with those we disagree with. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. To understand all is to forgive all. To love all is to be at peace with all, including yourself.

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.

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.

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. Churchill demanded equal courage from those in his own house. When asked by his daughter-in-law what they could possibly do if the Germans invaded Britain, he growled and replied, “You can always get a carving knife from the kitchen and take one with you, can’t you?”

In a beautiful letter to his sister-in-law, who was often bedridden, and depressed as a result, Kierkegaard wrote of the importance of walking. “Above all,” he told her in 1847, “do not lose your desire to walk: Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”

The psychologist William James spoke about making habits our ally instead of our enemy. That we can build around us a day and a life that is moral and ordered and still—and in so doing, create a kind of bulwark against the chaos of the world and free up the best of ourselves for the work we do. For this, we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

There was nothing but a shirt between the Stoics and the Cynics, joked the poet Juvenal, meaning the Stoics were sensible enough to wear clothes (and refrain from bodily functions in public), unlike the Cynics. This is a pretty reasonable concession. We don’t need to get rid of all our possessions, but we should constantly question what we own, why we own it, and whether we could do without.

The playwright Tennessee Williams spoke of luxury as the “wolf at the door.” It wasn’t the possessions that were the problem, he said, but the dependency. He called it the catastrophe of success, the way that we become less and less able to do things ourselves, the more and more we cannot be without a certain level of service. Not only is all your stuff a mess, but you need to pay someone to come clean it up. There is also what we can term “comfort creep.”

The best car is not the one that turns the most heads, but the one you have to worry about the least. The best clothes are the ones that are the most comfortable, that require you to spend the least amount of time shopping—regardless of what the magazines say. The best house for you is the one that feels the most like home. Don’t use your money to purchase loneliness, or headaches, or status anxiety.

You will hear people say they don’t have room for a relationship in their life . . . and they’re right. Their stuff is taking up too much space. They’re in love with possessions instead of people. The family who never see each other because the two parents are working late to pay off the extra bedrooms they never use? The fame that keeps someone on the road so much they’re a stranger to their kids? The supposed “technology” that is a pain in the ass to figure out, that’s always breaking? The fragile, fancy possessions that we’re constantly cleaning, buffing, protecting, and trying to find ways to slyly mention in conversation?

Each of us needs to put ourselves, physically, in the position to do that kind of deep work. We need to give our bodies, as Virginia Woolf put it, a room of our own—even if only for a few stolen hours—where we can think and have quiet and solitude. Buddha needed seclusion in his search for enlightenment. He had to step away from the world, go off by himself, and sit. Don’t you think you would benefit from that too? It’s hard to make that time. It’s hard (and expensive) to get away. We have responsibilities. But they will be better for our temporary disappearance. We will carry back with us the stillness from our solitude in the form of patience, understanding, gratitude, and insight.

The wise and busy also learn that solitude and stillness are there in pockets, if we look for them. The few minutes before going onstage for a talk or sitting in your hotel room before a meeting. The morning before the rest of the house wakes up. Or late in the evening after the world has gone to sleep. Grab these moments. Schedule them. Cultivate them.

Good decisions are not made by those who are running on empty. What kind of interior life can you have, what kind of thinking can you do, when you’re utterly and completely overworked? It’s a vicious cycle: We end up having to work more to fix the errors we made when we would have been better off resting, having consciously said no instead of reflexively saying yes. We end up pushing good people away (and losing relationships) because we’re wound so tight and have so little patience. The bull in Robert Earl Keen’s “Front Porch Song” whose “work is never done”? Do you want to be the artist who loses their joy for the process, who has strip-mined their soul in such a way that there is nothing left to draw upon? Burn out or fade away—that was the question in Kurt Cobain’s suicide note. How is that even a dilemma? It’s human being, not human doing, for a reason. Moderation. Being present. Knowing your limits. This is the key. The body that each of us has was a gift. Don’t work it to death. Don’t burn it out. Protect the gift.

The bloodshot engineer six Red Bulls deep has no chance of stillness. Nor does the recent grad—or not-so-recent grad—who still parties like she’s in college. Nor does the writer who plans poorly and promises himself he’ll finish his book in a sleepless three-day sprint. A 2017 study actually found that lack of sleep increases negative repetitive thinking. Abusing the body leads the mind to abuse itself. Sleep is the other side of the work we’re doing—sleep is the recharging of the internal batteries whose energy stores we recruit in order to do our work. It is a meditative practice. It is stillness. It’s the time when we turn off. It’s built into our biology for a reason. We have only so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person understands this and guards it carefully. The greats—they protect their sleep because it’s where the best state of mind comes from. They say no to things. They turn in when they hit their limits. They don’t let the creep of sleep deprivation undermine their judgment. They know there are some people who can function without sleep, but they are also smart and self-aware enough to know that everyone functions better when well-rested. Anders Ericsson, of the classic ten-thousand-hours study, found that master violinists slept eight and a half hours a night on average and took a nap most days. (A friend said of Churchill, “He made in Cuba one discovery which was to prove far more important to his future life than any gain in military experience, the life-giving powers of the siesta.”) According to Ericsson, great players nap more than lesser ones. How did the Zen master Hakuin prepare for his epic lecture, The Records of Old Sokko? He slept. A lot. He slept so much and so soundly that one of his students said that “his snores reverberated through the house like rumblings of thunder.” It went on for more than a month, with Hakuin waking only to see the occasional visitor. But every other minute was spent facedown, passed out in blissful, restful slumber. His attendants, who had not yet learned to appreciate the power of sleep, began to worry. The day the talks would be given was rapidly approaching. Was the master ever going to get serious about it? Or was he just going to waste his days asleep? They begged him to start working while there was still time. He simply rolled over and slept some more. Finally, as the deadline loomed large, but without a hint of urgency, Hakuin got up. Sitting, he called to his attendants, and began with perfect clarity to dictate the talk. It was all there. It was brilliant. It was the product of a rested mind that took care of its body. A healthy soul that could sleep soundly. And it has echoed down through the ages. If you want peace, there is just one thing to do. If you want to be your best, there is just one thing to do. Go to sleep. FIND A HOBBY This is the main question, with what activity one’s leisure is filled. —ARISTOTLE

The one thing you can’t escape in your life is yourself. Anyone who’s traveled long enough knows this. It’s eventually clear we carry with us on the road more baggage than just our suitcase and our backpacks. Emerson, who in his own life traveled to England and Italy and France and Malta and Switzerland (as well as extensively across America), pointed out that the people who built the sights and wonders that tourists liked to see didn’t do so while they traveled. You can’t make something great flitting around. You have to stick fast, like an axis of the earth. Those who think they will find solutions to all their problems by traveling far from home, perhaps as they stare at the Colosseum or some enormous moss-covered statue of Buddha, Emerson said, are bringing ruins to ruins. Wherever they go, whatever they do, their sad self comes along. A plane ticket or a pill or some plant medicine is a treadmill, not a shortcut. What you seek will come only if you sit and do the work, if you probe yourself with real self-awareness and patience. You have to be still enough to discover what’s really going on. You have to let the muddy water settle. That can’t happen if you’re jetting off from one place to another, if you’re packing your schedule with every activity you can think of in order to avoid the possibility of having to spend even a moment alone with your own thoughts.

Action is what matters. Pick up the phone and make the call to tell someone what they mean to you. Share your wealth. Run for office. Pick up the trash you see on the ground. Step in when someone is being bullied. Step in even if you’re scared, even if you might get hurt. Tell the truth. Maintain your vows, keep your word. Stretch out a hand to someone who has fallen. Do the hard good deeds. “You must do the thing you cannot do,” Eleanor Roosevelt said. It will be scary. It won’t always be easy, but know that what is on the other side of goodness is true stillness.

If you see fraud, and do not say fraud, the philosopher Nassim Taleb has said, you are a fraud. Worse, you will feel like a fraud. And you will never feel proud or happy or confident.

For those looking to do more reading on Eastern or Western philosophy, I recommend the following: Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius (Modern Library) Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, by Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden (Hackett) Letters of a Stoic by Seneca (Penguin Classics) The Bhagavad Gita (Penguin Classics) The Art of Happiness, by Epicurus (Penguin Classics) The New Testament: A Translation, by David Bentley Hart (Yale University Press) Buddha, by Karen Armstrong (Penguin Lives Biographies)