The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere (TED Books)

So often I see vacations as just a way to direct my work habits and relentlessness toward mapping out schedules and organizing train tickets, less concerned with the quality of my time than the quantity. A flight for me had always been a chance to catch up on job-related reading, to see movies I’d never been tempted to see when they were playing at

These days, in the age of movement and connection, space, as Marx had it in another context, has been annihilated by time; we feel as though we can make contact with almost anywhere at any moment. But as fast as geography is coming under our control, the clock is exerting more and more tyranny over us. And the more we can contact others, the more,

But what I discovered, almost instantly, was that as soon as I was in one place, undistracted, the world lit up and I was as happy as when I forgot about myself. Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else. It

It’s only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day. And it’s only by going nowhere—by sitting still or letting my mind relax—that I f

For all the daily excitement, however, something inside me felt that I was racing around so much that I never had a chance to see where I was going, or to check whether I was truly happy.

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” It’s the perspective we choose—not the places we visit—that ultimately tells us where we stand. Every time I take a trip, the experience acquires meaning and grows deeper only after I get back home and, sitting still, begin to convert the sights I’ve seen into l

You don’t get over the shadows inside you simply by walking away from them.

“There is nothing either good or bad,” as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” So much of our lives takes place in our heads—in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation—that sometimes I feel that I can best change my life by changing the way I look at

But the next time I was flying home—from New York to California—I tried to take a page out of my former seatmate’s near-empty book. I didn’t turn on my monitor. I didn’t race through a novel. I didn’t even consciously try to do nothing: when an idea came to me or I recalled something I had to do back home, I pulled out a notebook and scribbled it d