I am still in the middle of this. I will probably be in the middle of this for a long time.
I am trying to be still. I am not very good at it.
Many mornings I sit down to write, and within twenty minutes I have checked a thing on my phone, opened a tab I did not need, and lost the thread of the sentence I was halfway through. Then I go and refill the kettle. Then I come back and stare at the half-written sentence as if it is going to fix itself. The cursor blinks at me. I blink back. By the time I have actually written anything worth keeping, it is mid-morning and the room has acquired a strange low-grade hum that I have generated entirely by myself.
The title of this piece is something I keep returning to. Stillness is not the opposite of activity. It is not the result of doing nothing. It is what is left when you stop filling every available gap — between sentences, between tasks, between thoughts — with something else. A message, a tab, a scroll, a check, a refresh, a quick look. Most of the noise in my day is not coming from the world. It is coming from me.
The travel writer Pico Iyer made his career out of going to faraway places, and then, somewhere along the way, decided the most interesting destination was the one inside his own head. In his TED talk on stillness he says that "going nowhere was at least as exciting as going to Tibet or to Cuba," and that by going nowhere he means simply "taking a few minutes out of every day or a few days out of every season … in order to sit still long enough to find out what moves you most." When I first heard that, I felt slightly called out. I have done my share of moving around. The places have changed me. But I would not say any of them taught me how to be still. Stillness, it turns out, is not something a flight delivers.
The harder question is what we are running from when we will not sit with our own quiet. Some of it is real life — bills, deadlines, the next thing on the list. But I think a lot of it is just the habit of motion. We have trained ourselves so well to top up the silence that we have forgotten the silence was the point.
There is a piece of research I came across a long time ago that I think about often. The UC Irvine researcher Gloria Mark, who has spent years studying workers and timing how often we switch tasks, made an observation that lodged in my brain and has not left: "What fascinates me is that people interrupted themselves almost as much as they were interrupted by external sources." Not the email, not the Slack ping, not the colleague at the door — us. We are doing it to ourselves.
The first time I read that, I stopped and looked at my own day. There were the obvious external interruptions — Slack, messages, a phone notification. Fine, those I could blame on the world. But the rest of it, the constant little jumps from the writing tab to the email tab to the news tab to nothing in particular — that was all me. I was the source of my own residue.
So I started trying. Phone in another room before I sit down. Every browser tab closed except the one I am writing in and the one with my notes. Rain sounds on YouTube instead of music with lyrics, because anything with words pulls a piece of my attention sideways. A hard finish time, because work expands to fill whatever you give it. None of this is original — half the productivity internet has written about it. But it is what I have settled on after a lot of trying.
Most days it half works. Some days it doesn't work at all. I want to be honest about this — I am not some superhuman disciplined person who closes the door and emerges three hours later with a polished essay. There are afternoons I look up and realize I have spent ninety minutes "researching" something I was never going to write, with a half-eaten sandwich on the desk and a podcast running in the background and four open tabs none of which I remember opening. The work-in-progress part of this is not a humble brag. It is the actual state of affairs.
But when it does land, it is one of the better feelings I know. There is a particular kind of morning — usually a Tuesday or Wednesday, for reasons I cannot explain — where I sit down, the phone is somewhere else, the tabs are closed, the rain is doing its thing on the speakers, and after about fifteen minutes I look up and an hour has passed and I have actually written something.
Iyer's closing line from that talk is the one I have kept: "in an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention." I do not think he means we should all move to a cabin in the woods. I think he means the rarer the resource, the more valuable it is — and the rarest resource most of us have right now is our own undivided attention.
So the answer to the title, for me, is this. Stillness is not a meditation cushion and it is not a retreat in the mountains, although for some people it is those things. Stillness is what is left in the small, ordinary gaps of a day — the thirty seconds between finishing one sentence and starting the next, the ten minutes between meetings, the walk to the next café — if you do not immediately reach for something to fill them. The work is mostly negative work. Less reaching, less topping up, less self-interruption. The reward, when it shows up, is a kind of clarity that is hard to engineer any other way.
I am still in the middle of this. I will probably be in the middle of this for a long time. But on the days I manage even a small version of it, the writing is better, the day is calmer, and I notice the room I am sitting in. That feels like enough to keep trying.
