Pico iyer the art of stillness audio time
He focuses his work on the “human, individual and cultural” aspects of the countries he visits. Iyer focuses on the scene around him: “I’ve just met this fascinating stranger, and I want to hear everything about her, and I have these precious hours to get to see her present herself to me in her sights, sounds, smells, all of that,” he said. When he arrives in a new place, he prefers to walk around by himself as much as he can for the first 48 hours. He can go a whole trip alone, rarely talking to anyone. In his travels that have spanned well over 80 countries, Iyer almost never speaks the native language. With people and with places, Iyer tries to see past language. In that moment, Iyer realized that “words were the least of ways in which we could be friends.” After a while, Iyer thought he should go, but Cohen asked him to stay. They sat together outside in Cohen’s garden, saying nothing. Years later, Iyer visited Cohen again, this time at his house down the mountain. And he had truly found his great adventure and fulfillment sitting still.” The 61-year-old Cohen told Iyer that the “real, deep excitement he had found in life, the profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment that the world had to offer,” came from looking after his friends.Īfter Iyer left the mountain, he realized, “Well, here is somebody who has enjoyed everything that the world has to offer, everything that sex and drugs and rock and roll can provide. After Iyer pulled into the Mount Baldy Zen Center parking lot, he was met by a man he described as a “rather weathered figure in a ragged gown.” Soon, he discovered that the Zen monk before him was in fact his boyhood hero: Leonard Cohen.īefore that encounter, Iyer had idolized the singer and poet for his “his romantic lifestyle and his constant travels and his beautiful girlfriends.” But atop that mountain, Iyer was crushed. Iyer anchored his lecture in the teachings of a hermit he met on a mountain in 1995. “What was important was my finding the resolve just to step out of my life.” By spending quiet time alone, Iyer has been able to return to his loved ones with joy and energy rather than anxiety. “I quickly saw that the place itself is not important,” he said. Iyer found the religious side of his retreat “not ideal” but has since revisited the hermitage over 90 times without ever becoming Catholic.
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“I felt happier, calmer and clearer than I could ever remember.” Soon after, he drove several hours up Highway 1 and found the monastery. “Well, anything that works for a 15-year-old boy is probably ideal for me,” Iyer recalled thinking. In that period, another friend visited and told Iyer about retreats at a quiet Catholic monastery in Big Sur that had calmed down “even the most fidgety, phone-addicted and restless” of his high school students. With no home to return to, he spent months sleeping on his friend’s floor. Iyer learned to balance his own frenetic globetrotting with experiences of stillness soon after the fire of 1990. Iyer acknowledged that college life challenges the practice of stillness and encouraged students to find a balance.
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“Anything that allows your mind to wander actually makes you more focused,” he said, adding that he has never had a meditation practice. In stillness, the mind is unoccupied and without deadlines to meet. In a seminar the next morning, Iyer took questions about stillness and what it might look like at the University. During his talk and seminar hosted by the Cogut Institute last week, Iyer reflected on his journeys and how he has found stillness in modern life through solitary retreats and writing. Iyer’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, TIME, Vanity Fair and Granta, and his 13 books have been translated into 23 languages. Now, at 62, the travel writer looks back on that inferno as the start of finding stillness in his life.
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Though he lost 15 years of notes and three of his unfinished books, Iyer managed to save one nearly completed manuscript and his cat, Minnie. When Iyer reached safety, he filed a story about it for TIME magazine. In 1990, a California wildfire incinerated Pico Iyer’s family home.