A follow up to Pico Iyers essay The Joy of Quiet, The Art of Stillness considers the unexpected adventure of staying put and reveals a counterintuitive truth The more ways we have to connect, the more we seem desperate to unplug. Why might a lifelong traveler like Pico Iyer, who has journeyed from Easter Island to Ethiopia, Cuba to Kathmandu, think that sitting quietly in a room might be the ultimate adventure? Because in our madly accelerating world, our lives are crowded, chaotic and noisy. Theres never been a greater need to slow down, tune out and give ourselves permission to be still. In The Art of Stillness—a TED Books release—Iyer investigate the lives of people who have made a life seeking stillness from Matthieu Ricard, a Frenchman with a PhD in molecular biology who left a promising scientific career to become a Tibetan monk, to revered singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, who traded the pleasures of the senses for several years of living the near-silent life of meditation as a Zen monk.
