Mark: Alright, Michelle, I have a challenge for you. The world's most famous travel writer—a man who has built his entire career on going everywhere—writes a book arguing that the greatest adventure is... going absolutely nowhere. What's your first reaction? Michelle: That he's either a genius or he's just really, really tired of airport security. Probably both. Mark: Exactly! And that's the beautiful paradox we're diving into today with Pico Iyer's book, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere. It’s this tiny book that packs a massive punch. Michelle: Pico Iyer. I know the name. He’s a legend in travel writing, right? Always seems to be in some far-flung, exotic location. Mark: That’s what makes this so compelling. What's fascinating is that Iyer, born to Indian parents in England, educated at Eton and Harvard, and a lifelong globetrotter for Time magazine, is the last person you'd expect to write this. He's not a monk or a guru; he's one of us, just with a lot more frequent flyer miles. That's what makes his argument so powerful and, honestly, so credible. Michelle: Okay, I’m intrigued. A travel writer telling us to stay put. It feels like a chef telling you the best meal is fasting. Where does he even start with an argument like that? Mark: He kicks it off with a story about another world traveler who found his greatest solace in sitting still: the one and only Leonard Cohen.

Michelle: Oh, I love this. Leonard Cohen, the ultimate cool, globetrotting poet. You imagine him finding inspiration in Parisian cafes or on a Greek island, not... sitting on a cushion. Mark: Precisely. Iyer visits him in the late 90s at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center, high in the mountains near Los Angeles. Cohen, a man who had seen and done it all, was living there as a near-anonymous monk. His room was bare. He spent his days in silent meditation or doing chores, like tending to the 88-year-old Japanese abbot. Michelle: That sounds incredibly austere. What was he getting out of it? Was he running from something? Mark: That’s what Iyer wondered. But Cohen’s answer is the heart of this book. He tells Iyer that sitting still is "the real deep entertainment." He calls it a "feast" that is more "voluptuous and delicious" than anything else. He says, "Nothing touches it." Michelle: Wow. 'Deep entertainment'? My brain just screams at me with a to-do list when I'm still for five minutes. What could he possibly mean by that? It sounds like the opposite of entertainment. Mark: It’s about a shift in perspective. Iyer frames it as the difference between horizontal and vertical travel. Most of us live our lives horizontally—we move across the surface, from one place to the next, one task to the next, one notification to the next. We think progress is about covering ground. Michelle: Yeah, that’s my life in a nutshell. My calendar looks like a flight map. Mark: Cohen, and Iyer himself, discovered vertical travel. That’s the journey inward. It’s about staying in one place and going deep. Instead of seeing more of the world, you see the world, and yourself, more clearly. Michelle: Okay, let me see if I get this. It’s like the difference between scrolling endlessly through a hundred vacation photos on your phone versus going to a museum and staring at one masterpiece painting for an hour. At first, it's just a painting, but after a while, you start to see the brushstrokes, the hidden symbols, the artist's emotion... Mark: That is a perfect analogy. You’re not consuming, you’re perceiving. And that’s exactly what Iyer did himself. He tells this incredible story about being in his late twenties, living the dream life in New York City. He had a great job at Time magazine, a fancy apartment, he was traveling the world. But he felt empty, like he was just accumulating experiences without understanding any of them. Michelle: I think a lot of people can relate to that feeling. The highlight reel looks great, but behind the scenes, it feels hollow. Mark: So he does something that seems crazy to everyone, especially his father. He quits his job and moves to Kyoto, Japan, to live for a year in a single, tiny room. He had no TV, no car, nothing. He just wanted to see what would happen if he stopped moving. Michelle: And what did happen? Did he have some huge, movie-like epiphany? Mark: The epiphany was the lack of an epiphany. He realized that his happiness wasn't in the next trip or the next promotion. It was in his own mind. He quotes Shakespeare: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." By sitting still in Kyoto, he wasn't rejecting the world; he was finally learning how to properly see it. He realized that going nowhere was the grand adventure that made sense of everywhere else. Michelle: That’s a powerful idea. That the quality of your life isn't determined by where you go, but by the quality of your attention when you're there. Or even when you're not there, when you're just sitting in your room. Mark: Exactly. He says, "In an age of speed, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel so luxurious as paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still."

Michelle: Okay, I'm sold on the idea of it. It sounds beautiful and profound. But let's be real, this can't all be peaceful bliss and Zen gardens. The book must touch on the scary side of this, right? The loneliness, the anxiety of just being with your own thoughts? Mark: Absolutely. And this is why the book feels so honest. Iyer doesn't romanticize it at all. He has a whole chapter called "Alone in the Dark." He talks about how "nowhere, even when chosen, can be frightening because there is nowhere to hide from oneself." Michelle: That’s it. That’s the fear. There are no more distractions. It’s just you and your own mental baggage. Mark: He brings up the poet Emily Dickinson, who lived in near-total seclusion. From the outside, it looks peaceful. But her poems are full of fire and terror and passion. She wrote, "Ourself behind ourself concealed— / Should startle most." Stillness forces you to meet that concealed self. Michelle: Can you give me another story from the book that really shows that struggle? I want to feel it. Mark: The most powerful example is Thomas Merton. Here’s a man who was a Trappist monk for over 25 years. He lived a life of contemplation and silence at an abbey in Kentucky. If anyone had mastered stillness, it was him. But then, in his fifties, he has to go to a hospital for back surgery. Michelle: Okay... Mark: And there, he falls completely, head-over-heels in love with a young student nurse. He calls her 'M' in his journals. This man of God, sworn to chastity, is suddenly writing about her with the passion of a teenager. He’s sneaking phone calls, writing love letters. His whole world, built on decades of stillness and spiritual purity, is turned upside down. Michelle: Wow. So even in a monastery, you can't escape your own humanity. The stillness didn't erase his desires; it seems like it just made them more potent when they finally surfaced. Mark: It amplified them. It shows that you can't just walk away from your inner shadows. They will find you. And that’s a crucial, humbling part of this journey. But here’s where the book pivots in a way I found absolutely fascinating for our modern world. It takes this difficult, ancient practice and shows its redemption in the most unlikely places. Michelle: Where? Not another monastery, I'm guessing. Mark: Think the opposite. Think Silicon Valley. Iyer describes visiting the Google headquarters. You'd expect it to be the epicenter of distraction. But they have a hugely popular internal course called "Search Inside Yourself," which is basically meditation and mindfulness training for engineers. They have "Yogler" programs. They understand that to process the insane amount of information they deal with, they need to cultivate moments of total disconnection. Michelle: Hold on. From a monk struggling with desire to a Google engineer trying to improve focus? That's a huge leap. It feels like one is about saving your soul and the other is about... improving productivity. Mark: It is a leap, but the underlying tool is the same. And the stakes get even higher. The most stunning example for me was about the military. Iyer tells the story of a Marine Corps Scout Sniper named Andrew. This is a guy trained for intense action. He enrolls in a program to practice sitting still, mostly to prove it wrong. Michelle: A Marine meditating. I’m trying to picture it. Mark: He’s skeptical, but after forty days of concentrated attention, he finds himself becoming, in his words, "unusually happy." More importantly, he becomes a better Marine. He’s calmer, more selective about threats. He has this amazing realization: "That something this simple could be so powerful. And something so soft could also make me so much harder as a Marine." Michelle: That gives me chills. "Something so soft could make me so much harder." It completely reframes stillness. It’s not weakness or passivity. It’s a source of strength. Mark: It's a strategic tool. He even tells a story of another officer in Afghanistan whose vehicle gets hit by an IED. His legs are destroyed. But because he had trained in tactical breathing and staying calm under pressure—a form of applied stillness—he had the presence of mind to tourniquet his own legs and direct the rescue, saving his own life and the lives of others. Michelle: That’s incredible. So this isn't just a philosophical luxury for poets and writers. It’s a survival skill. And it’s interesting because, as you mentioned, some readers have found the book a bit light on practical "how-to" advice. But maybe these stories are the how-to. They show its application in the most extreme circumstances imaginable. Mark: I think that’s exactly right. The book isn't a manual. It's a series of powerful demonstrations. It shows that whether you're a monk, a tech CEO, or a soldier, the ability to command your own attention is the ultimate power.

Michelle: So when you boil it all down, what’s the central takeaway here? We’re not all going to move to a monastery or join the Marines. How does this apply to us, here and now, with our buzzing phones and endless emails? Mark: I think in the end, Iyer's argument isn't about abandoning the world. It’s about finding a way to bring a piece of that monastery, that quiet, into our daily, chaotic lives. He talks about the idea of a "secular Sabbath." Michelle: A secular Sabbath. What does he actually mean by that? Is it just... taking a nap on Sunday? Mark: It’s more intentional than that. He quotes the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, who described the Sabbath as creating "a cathedral in time rather than in space." It’s about carving out a protected period—it could be an hour, a day—where you are off-limits to the demands of the world. No email, no news, no chores. It’s a deliberate pause. Michelle: A cathedral in time. I love that phrase. It feels so much more manageable than a cathedral in space, which would require, you know, a building permit and a lot of stone. Mark: And it’s in that quiet space that we get perspective. We remember what’s actually important. We untangle the knots in our thinking. We don't solve our problems by frantically trying to fix them; as one of the monks in the book says, we "bear with them until they somehow solve themselves." The stillness gives them room to do that. Michelle: It makes so much sense. We charge our phones every night, but we almost never give our own minds a chance to fully recharge. We just put them on low-power mode while we sleep. Mark: And the book suggests that even a small investment pays huge dividends. Just taking 20 or 30 minutes a day to sit quietly, without a device, is a radical act. It’s where you get your best ideas. It’s where you remember who you are, separate from your job or your online persona. Michelle: You know, it’s funny. The book is called The Art of Stillness, and it has this very gentle, poetic feel. But the message underneath is actually quite urgent and almost defiant. It’s a quiet rebellion against the noise of modern life. Mark: It is. It’s a call to reclaim our own attention. Maybe the first step isn't some grand gesture. Maybe it's just turning off your phone for the next 10 minutes after this podcast ends. Michelle: I think that's a perfect, practical starting point. It makes you wonder, what's the one distraction you could give up today, just for a little while, to see what you might hear in the silence? Mark: A powerful question to end on. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.