Download The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere AudioBook Free
A follow up to Pico Iyer's article "The Enjoyment of Quiet," The Skill of Stillness considers the surprising adventure of keeping yourself put and reveals a counterintuitive real truth: A lot more ways we must connect, the greater we seem eager to unplug. Why would a man who seems in a position to go almost everywhere and do anything - like the international heartthrob and Rock 'n' Spin Hall of Famer Leonard Cohen - choose to spend years relaxing still and going nowhere? What can Nowhere offer that no Everywhere can match? And just why might a lifelong tourist like Pico Iyer, who has journeyed from Easter Island to Ethiopia, Cuba to Kathmandu, think that sitting silently in an area and getting to know the times of year and panoramas of Nowhere might be the ultimate adventure? In The Skill of Stillness, Iyer attracts on the lives of well-known wanderer-monks like Cohen - as well as from his own experiences as a travel copy writer who chooses to spend almost all of his amount of time in rural Japan - to explore why advancements in technology are making us more likely to retreat. Iyer shows that this is perhaps the reason why many people - even those with no religious determination - seem to be turning to yoga, or yoga, or tai chi. These aren't MODERN fads a great deal as ways to rediscover the intelligence of a youthful age. There exists a good growing style toward watching an "Internet sabbath" weekly, turning off online relationships from Friday night to Monday morning and reviving those early customs known as family meals and conversation. In this time of constant motion and connectedness, perhaps residing in one place is a far more exciting potential client, and a larger necessity than previously. The Skill of Stillness paints an image of why so many have found richness in stillness and what - from Marcel Proust to Blaise Pascal to Phillipe Starck - they've gained there.