Stillness Is the Key

Timeless Stoic and Buddhist philosophy

By Ryan Holiday

Category: Mindfulness & Happiness | Reading Duration: 33 min | Rating: 4.6/5 (3219 ratings)

About the Book

Stillness Is the Key (2019) shows us the importance of stillness – the ability to think clearly, avoid distraction, conquer impulses, and find happiness. Drawing on wisdom from history’s greatest philosophers, and on the habits of outstanding athletes, leaders, and artists, this summary show how achieving stillness is a powerful way to find contentedness and success in life.

Who Should Read This?

• Frazzled people seeking to escape the constant distractions of modern life
• Busy people who need more balance, calm, and focus
• Fast movers who want to slow down

What’s in it for me? Embrace the power of stillness.

When was the last time you just stopped? Put down your devices, ignored your notifications and simply spent a moment being still? Being present, thoughtful and reflective? In today’s busy, noisy, distracting world, it’s hard to be still. But history’s greatest thinkers and leaders have recognized that stillness is a secret weapon. They had different names for it. The Buddhists called it upekkha. The Muslims referred to aslama. The Stoics named it apatheia. They were talking about the same thing: an inner peace, a profound stillness. The benefits of fostering stillness are hard to overstate. It can bring moments of great clarity and creativity. It can help you triumph over bad temper. It can create the space to appreciate and rejoice in the pleasures of life. And anybody can learn to be still, even as the world rages and roars around them. So let’s dive in and find out why stillness is the key. Content warning: Strong language is used in chapter 6. In this Blink, you’ll learn - how a White House gardener helped save the world from nuclear destruction;

• why laying bricks allowed Winston Churchill to perform at his best; and
• what Napoleon can teach us about our notification settings.

Chapter 1: Finding stillness

One day in Rome, in the first century CE, the power broker, playwright, and philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca was trying to work. It wasn’t easy. The noise in Seneca’s environment was unrelenting. Beneath his room was a gym, where athletes grunted and groaned, their weights banging and clanking. Out in the street, dogs barked and vendors shouted their wares. As though this external ruckus weren’t enough, Seneca was also plagued by a cacophony of concerns. His finances were under threat, his enemies had pushed him out of political life, and he was losing favor with his patron, Emperor Nero. All in all, it was not a situation conducive to getting much done, let alone engaging in activities of intellectual value like deep thought, creativity, or decision-making. Seneca’s problem – struggling to find stillness in a very unstill world – probably sounds familiar. In our time, things are even noisier. To the banging and barking of Seneca’s environment, we can add loud phone conversations, cars roaring by, planes overhead. Depending on where you live, there may not be so many vendors shouting their wares, but now we’ve got overflowing inboxes and unceasing social-media notifications, an eternal chorus of pinging and dinging and ringing. So – what can you do? Seneca, for his part, found peace amid the noise by embracing stillness. So what is stillness? Have you ever concentrated so deeply that, as though from nowhere, like a bolt from the blue, a burst of insight suddenly struck you? That is stillness. Or have you stepped in front of an audience and poured months of practice into a single, powerful performance? That is stillness. Have you watched the slow rise of the morning sun and been warmed by the simple fact of being alive? That is stillness. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke puts it, in a state of stillness, we are “full, complete" – and “all the random and approximate [are] muted.” Seneca was able to find this stillness, to “mute” his inner and outer environments, and, though plagued by troubles and distractions, find the serenity to write incisive, powerful philosophical essays that have influenced millions and millions of people. Seneca believed that if people could find peace within themselves, all else would be possible – thought, work, a good life – even if the world around them was at war. Seneca lived thousands of years ago, but the power of stillness abides. Around the world, philosophers and religions have embraced stillness, calling it by many and various names: upekkha (Buddhists), aslama (Muslims), aequanimitas (Christians), apatheia (Stoics). (Apatheia, by the way, which is the root of the word apathy, doesn’t mean listless or apathetic or emotionless. It means to be undisturbed by passion – in a good way. Equanimity might be the best translation, a kind of emotional stillness.) Point is, under different names, in different guises, stillness can be found all around the world, and all throughout history. In this Blink, we’ll explore how to find it for ourselves.

Chapter 2: Stillness in crisis

On October 15, 1962, John F. Kennedy woke up to a dramatically changed world. While he’d been sleeping, the CIA had identified Soviet nuclear missile sites being constructed in Cuba, less than a hundred miles from the Florida coast. Suddenly, what had seemed like a remote possibility was very close to home – the possibility of a nuclear attack on the United States. It was a time of immense pressure for Kennedy. If the Soviet provocation spiraled into war, if a war resulted in a nuclear attack . . . well, Kennedy knew that at least seventy million people would likely die in the initial strikes. The advice from his advisors was clear and totally instinctual: aggression must be met with greater aggression. The missile sites had to be destroyed. But Kennedy resisted. If this approach failed, it would trigger a catastrophic nuclear war. The thirteen tense days that followed have come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Had Kennedy failed to maintain his equanimity, had he followed his advisors advice, we might remember that time by a different name (the beginning of World War III, maybe?) or we might not be alive to remember it at all. Luckily, though, Kennedy was able to remain composed, even as the threat of armageddon loomed. How? Well, rather than losing his head, he found stillness. Next time you find yourself in a high-stakes situation, try to do the same. Act from a place of stillness, not a place of stress. You can do this by doing what Kennedy did: resist your gut feelings and slow things down. Let’s look at his process. First, he resisted his gut reaction: he didn’t immediately order a missile strike on the missile sites. Second, he slowed things down. Instead of rushing into a decision, Kennedy stayed reflective. Sailing was his usual meditative activity, but there was no time for that. So, instead, he swam in the White House pool to give himself space to think. He also sought peace and solitude in the Rose Garden; later, he even thanked the resident gardener for her contribution to solving the crisis. Eventually, he announced a blockade of Cuba. It didn’t resolve the crisis, but Kennedy had decided that a swift outcome was less important than making sure his Soviet equivalent, First Secretary Nikita Krushchev, also had time and space to think. This proved to be a great move. Eleven days after the crisis began, the Soviet leader wrote to Kennedy. If leaders do not display statesmanlike wisdom, he wrote, they will clash, bringing mutual annihilation. The crisis was over, and negotiations over the removal of missiles began. Kennedy had helped pull the world back from the edge of global cataclysm. And he’d accomplished this not by flexing the muscle of US military might, not by meeting aggression with aggression, but by finding the time and space – the stillness – to think his options through and choose the wisest course.

Chapter 3: The power of presence

In 2010, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the performance artist Marina Abramović turned stillness into a feat of endurance. In the museum, for 750 hours across 79 days, she sat, still and silent. Across from her chair was another chair, in which visitors could come and sit. More than fifteen hundred museum visitors sat in that chair. Each time, Marina took a moment to look down and collect herself before looking up. When she did meet the gaze of her new visitor, she was truly there, truly with them. The show was called “The Artist is Present.” Marina knew that if she started daydreaming or exhibited fatigue or boredom – if she let her presentness slip in any way – it would instantly be clear to the person opposite her. So she focused solely on the present moment. Visitors who sat across from Marina found the experience deeply moving. Some of them, when confronted by her complete presentness, her total occupation of the moment, were overcome by emotion and wept openly. Why? Well, most people, most of the time, aren’t trying to occupy the moment. They’re trying to get out of it. Instead of enjoying a beautiful sunset, we take a photo of it. Or if we ever have a quiet evening at home, our minds race through lists of things that need doing. Even standing in line to see Marina Abramović, we’re not totally there. We’re checking our phones instead. But not being present comes at a cost. As obvious as it sounds, as much as you’ve probably heard it, it’s true: the present is all you’ve got. If you’re not here, now, then you’re letting life slip past you, unnoticed. Artists like Marina Abramović remain awake to the present. They are present. While we go through our lives distracting ourselves with hopes and fears and fantasies, artists truly see. And it’s this stillness, this occupation of the moment, that breeds brilliance. Athletes are coached to be absolutely present – not just because it’s nice to cherish each passing moment but because distraction means subpar performance. To be at the top of your game, you have to be there. Same goes for life. Be here. Whatever you’re working on, don’t consider what naysayers might say. Don’t worry or overthink. Still your mind – and be present.

Chapter 4: Reflect deeply

On June 12, 1942, Anne Frank wrote in her diary for the first time. She hoped she would be able to confide everything to the diary, she wrote, and that it would be a source of comfort to her. Just 24 hours later, Anne’s family was forced into hiding from the Nazis. Anne continued to journal, a habit that continued to reward her with valuable insights, even under the dire circumstances in which she and her family found themselves. She discovered that writing can be a way to watch yourself as if you are a stranger, giving you a fresh perspective on your actions. How noble everyone would be, she once wrote, if at the end of the day they reviewed their behavior. Surely we would all try to do better the following day. Anne Frank wasn’t the first to notice this. Our Stoic philosopher friend Seneca, for example, wrote in his journal every night. He spared no detail and hid from no hard truth. After that, he said, he slept soundly. History is full of other notable journalers, including Oscar Wilde, Queen Victoria, tennis champion Martina Navratilova, and baseball all-star Shawn Green. And no wonder – there’s clear evidence that journaling improves our well-being. Studies have shown that keeping a journal helps to restore well-being following traumatic events. A University of Arizona study found that people going through a divorce found it easier to move on if they recorded their experiences in a journal. So, to cut through the noise of daily life and focus on the most important reflections of the day, try picking up a pen and paper. And when you do, take Seneca’s example and be sure to face up to any tough questions that arise: Why did I get so worked up about this today? Why do I care about impressing my coworkers? How did today’s problems reveal my character? Honestly and thoughtfully facing up to these questions is the best way, the only way, to get the most out of journaling. But how do you start? Well, the how, when, and where don’t matter so much. What’s really important is simply creating a quiet moment to get things off your chest. To find stillness through writing and reflection. Journal in the evening, the morning, or for five minutes while sitting on the train – whenever you can, really. It might be the most important time in your whole day.

Chapter 5: Cultivate silence

Life is noisy. Phones ring, notifications beep, and many of us wear headphones on a daily basis, blocking out unwanted noise with different, more desirable noise. Sitting in an airplane with nowhere to go, you can see how much we rely on “noise” to avoid silence. We watch terrible movies or listen to podcasts rather than sit in silence and contemplate the terrain of our own thoughts. But why turn our minds over to distracting noise when we could instead take advantage of the great riches that silence offers us? Those riches are something that experimental music composer John Cage understood profoundly. Cage had always been fascinated by silence. In 1928, during a high school speaking competition, he even argued that the United States should establish a national day of quiet. It was the beginning of a life spent exploring what silence truly means. Cage’s most famous creation, titled 4’33, is a composition with a twist: it’s a four-minute, thirty-three-second-long stretch of uninterrupted silence. During a pianist’s first performance of the piece, the audience sat listening to the silence. During the first movement of the piece, they could hear the wind outside the hall. During the second, raindrops pattered on the roof. After the performance, Cage pointed out something important. Silence, he said, doesn’t really exist; what we think of as silence isn’t actually silent, because it’s full of accidental sounds. By giving people silence, Cage was helping them to start actually hearing. There’s a lesson there for all of those whose lives are too noisy. Silence, or an absence of noise, can help us to refocus and to find clarity. To find stillness. Leadership expert Randall Stutman, who works with CEOs and Wall Street leaders, once studied how business big shots recharge during their time off. The key, he discovered, lay in spending time in environments with minimal noise, enjoying activities like long-distance cycling, swimming or scuba diving. There, these leaders recharged by escaping from the voices that cluttered their working lives. Dialing down the noise like this helps us discover a deeper awareness of what’s around us. That could mean simple awareness of the rain on the roof as a pianist sits silently at a piano. Or it could mean the answers to your business problems, which pop into your head during your twentieth mile on the bike.

Chapter 6: Stillness of the soul

In June 2008, Tiger Woods won an eighteen-hole playoff to win the US Open golf championship for the third time. It was his fourteenth victory at a major, and some described it as one of the finest victories ever seen in the sport. And what’s more, he did the whole thing with a leg that was broken in two places. It was the high point of Woods’s career. But not long afterward, the golfer’s world collapsed. For 21 days, the front pages of the New York Post detailed his affairs with porn stars and waitresses, as well as trysts in church parking lots and with the young daughters of family friends. His secret life exposed, Woods didn’t win another major for over ten years. As the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh has said, while the surface of the ocean may seem still, underneath there are currents. That was certainly the case for Tiger Woods, a man famous for his ability to find stillness in moments of stress who was, in fact, at the mercy of powerful riptides lurking under the surface. That’s no surprise once you understand how Tiger Woods was raised to be a champion. His father, recognizing that golf relies on an ability to keep a clear head, would taunt Woods as he tried to tee off, calling him a “motherfucker” or slinging racist abuse at moments of high concentration. His mother threatened to beat him if he ruined her reputation as a parent. In Woods’s own words, he was raised to be a cold-blooded killer on the golf course. And it worked. His upbringing made him a great champion. But it also left him with a profoundly troubled soul, which drove him to neglect and betray his family in pursuit of dishonest and ultimately dissatisfying affairs. Later Woods reflected on this time in his life and realized that if you’re lying all the time, life is no fun. Woods’s story shows that the relentless pursuit of anything isn’t worth it if we damage our souls in the process. As we’ve seen, stillness is handy for becoming more effective in business or in sports. But what’s it all for if in our personal lives we’re more like hot-blooded, raging bulls than the serene monks we aim to be? Our happiness, and our contentedness in life, comes from achieving stillness of the soul.

Chapter 7: Know when you have enough

Not all of John F. Kennedy’s behavior during the Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated the ideals of stillness. At one point, with American and Soviet forces on the brink of conflict, Kennedy had a rendezvous with a 19-year-old student from Wheaton College at a hotel near the White House. The most powerful man in the world was being led astray by his base desires at a critical time. But before you judge too harshly, take a moment to reflect on how much you’re driven by desire. Most of us fall prey to desire, whether for a beautiful person, power, the latest iPhone, or money. If we’re overly driven by our desires, it becomes harder to achieve true contentedness. That’s because superficial desires, as opposed to those that lead to more noble pursuits, usually come at a cost. The Greek philosopher Epicurus had a good test for distinguishing between the two: any time he felt himself being tugged by a new desire, he asked himself, “How will I feel afterward if I actually get what I want?” Asking yourself this question will help you focus on the hangover, and not just the taste of the drink; on the sense of guilt, and not just the thrill of the affair. Once you’ve learned to control your desires, it may be easier to take an important step toward finding stillness: accepting that you have enough. The writers Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller once attended a party at the palatial home of a billionaire. Vonnegut asked his friend how it felt to know that their host had probably earned more that same day than Heller’s book, Catch-22, had earned in its whole history. Heller replied that he had something the billionaire never would: the knowledge that he had enough. Heller meant that he was content with what he had achieved. This acceptance of enough can be a beautiful thing, bringing stillness in the form of release from want and comparison to others. So if you find yourself lusting for more, remind yourself of Heller’s contented embrace of enough. And know that after he said those words, Heller went on to produce six more novels. But he wasn’t doing it to prove anything to himself or to anyone else. When a reporter critically commented that Heller hadn’t written anything as good as his first work, Heller was able to reply with equanimity, “Who has?”

Chapter 8: Bask in the beauty

There’s a concept in Japan called shinrin yoku, or “forest bathing.” It’s a kind of therapy that uses nature to heal spiritual woes, not unlike, as discussed earlier, Kennedy finding stillness in the White House’s Rose Garden during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Of course, it isn’t always possible to take regular forest baths ourselves. Maybe you live in the city and can’t always retreat to the wilderness in search of beauty. But if we can attune ourselves to less obvious manifestations of beauty, we begin to see it everywhere. That was the case for Roman philosopher and emperor Marcus Aurelius. Often seen as a dark and depressive Stoic, Marcus Aurelius wrote vividly of finding beauty in the ordinary. He talked of how bread splits as it bakes, and its cracks catch our eye and stir appetite within us. He even found beauty in death. We should, he wrote, come gracefully to our final resting place, falling as a ripened olive might: grateful to the tree that gave it life and growth. So no matter where you find yourself, take inspiration from Marcus Aurelius and John F. Kennedy and simply notice the beauty around you. The stillness that you find there may be a rarely appreciated phenomenon in most of our lives. But there is an inexhaustible supply of it in the world. You just need to take a moment to look.

Chapter 9: Finding stillness in activity

Winston Churchill led a productive life. By age 26, he’d been elected to the British parliament. He would continue to serve in government over the course of six and a half decades. As Britain’s wartime prime minister, he helped defeat Nazism. He also wrote over 40 books and gave more than two thousand speeches throughout his long and prolific life. Churchill might seem like the last person from whom we would expect stillness, but in fact he possessed it in spades. And his life was a prime example of one particular method for bringing peace and stillness to even the busiest life: taking care of yourself physically. Churchill’s physical activity of choice was bricklaying, which was unusual, to say the least. He learned from two of his employees at his Chartwell estate, and soon fell in love with the meditative process of mixing mortar, trowelling it on, and stacking up the bricks. In a 1927 letter to then-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, Churchill wrote that he had enjoyed a delightful month. Alongside his duties as a minister, he had written 2,000 words a day and also laid 200 bricks. According to Churchill’s daughter Mary, bricklaying and her father’s other much-loved hobby, painting, were more than just pastimes. They were also his primary antidotes for the depression to which he was prone. Both activities allowed him an intellectual escape and, crucially, an opportunity to exercise his body. Cultivating mind and body can be a huge step toward becoming even a fraction as productive as Churchill, and a hobby is an ideal way to do so. That’s why so many of the great figures in history were also hobbyists on the side. A generation before Churchill, four-time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom William Gladstone took up chopping down trees. John Cage became a mushroom hunter. So consider what physical activity might help release you from the pressures of your work or life and allow you to find the stillness that Gladstone found in the thwack of axe on oak, or that Churchill found in the slap of mortar on brick. But whatever you choose, you shouldn’t take things too far, as we’ll see in our final chapter.

Chapter 10: Make room for rest

Though Churchill discovered the joys of bricklaying at his own estate, it was in Cuba where he made arguably the most important discovery of his life. It wasn’t a military strategy or a rhetorical device. No, it was the energy-giving powers of the siesta. Sure, taking care of ourselves physically means being active and finding ways to invigorate and enrich ourselves. But it’s easy to focus too much on activity, as many of us do at work. It’s all too common in our society to trade health for a few more hours in the office. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” say bankers, lawyers and start-up founders, as they put in another grueling shift. But the true greats – the Winston Churchills of this world – know that no matter how active we are, we should never neglect the simple power of sleep. Sleep is something to be protected, because it allows us to perform at our best. The psychologist Anders Ericsson studied master violinists, and found that they slept a full eight and a half hours each night on average, and napped most days. What’s more, the greats napped more than lesser performers. There’s more to this than just physiological benefits. Accepting that you need to stop working and get some sleep is fundamentally a question of knowing your limits. And this, the embrace of moderation, is another great route to stillness. Too many of us are simply trying to do too much. Prince Albert, husband to Britain’s Queen Victoria in the nineteenth century, was a prime example. Prince Albert didn’t just take his role as Prince Consort seriously. He took it too seriously, with an endless series of meetings and social obligations. He threw himself into organizing the 1851 Great Exhibition, a six-month-long celebration of the British Empire, and spent years of his life on the project. By the time it opened, he told his family that he felt more dead than alive. The event was a great success, but Albert’s health never recovered from this overwork. When he died in 1861, his doctors believed that his constant overwork had seriously damaged his health. He had literally worked himself to death. Many of us today feel that there is always something to do. We tell ourselves that we need to reply to that email. That we have to join the last-minute out-of-state business trip. We don’t. Stop. Be present. Know your limits. Embrace moderation. Protect the gift that is your body. Give attention to your physical health, to your spirit and your mind, and you can cultivate stillness. You can feel its power in your life. So slow things down. Calm things down. Quiet things down. Embrace stillness today.

Final summary

Final summary The key message in this summary: There’s one key quality shared by truly great people: the ability to be still, even while the world rages around them. So be still. That means: being present, cultivating silence, reflecting deeply (by journaling), finding the beauty in life (or taking a nice forest bath), knowing when you have enough, having a hobby, and taking care of your body (get enough sleep and physical exercise).  Actionable advice: Get rid of your stuff  We are born free of belongings, and then start accumulating stuff. How much of it do we need? A rich life is a life rich in people and experiences, not knickknacks and expensive clothes. So pick up a few garbage bags. Start filling them up. Think of it as a way to make space, both for your mind and for freedom from unimportant things. To make space, in other words, for stillness.

About the Author

Ryan Holiday is an American author, media strategist, and bookstore owner. He’s also the host of the Daily Stoic podcast. His other books include Lives of the Stoics, Ego is the Enemy, and The Obstacle is the Way.