I'm reading a book about stillness

and it is making me cross

Hi, I’m Layla. I write about how it feels to live on this beautiful, tattered planet right now. I explore both the small day to day beauties of life and the tough, gnarly challenges and hurdles we face as part of being human. Upgrade to paid for early morning writing sessions, live ideas salon calls, seasonal sessions & more.

Hello friends,

This post was due to be a simple list, but I found myself writing an introduction to the list that then took on a mind of its own. It’s a follow on in many ways from my post last week on life moving faster than the speed of thought, which you can read here:

10 things I'm doing to slow down time

In this post I share that I plan to write a list of the things I do at the speed of thought. And I will, list is incoming. But as I compiled it I found myself thinking more and more about the idea of stillness, my striving for it and why it feels so unattainable. And I kept coming up with questions and thoughts I wanted to write down. So I did. Here’s a little bit of the inside of my brain on the matter which I’m sharing in lieu of a list this Friday.

Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty five minutes to recover from a phone call. Twenty five minutes for our brain waves to settle and our nervous systems to equalise. TWENTY FIVE. That number blows my mind. What about being in 19 different WhatsApp groups for multiple children’s activities? How long does it take to recover from looking at THAT?¹

Researchers have also found that we experience an interruption like this phonecall every eleven minutes in our day. We can never, as Pico Iyer observes in his book The Art of Stillness, catch up with ourselves.

Pico says stillness is great. And lists lots of men who agree.

Last week I wrote about the gaps in my life and how they seem to be constantly stuffed to the brim. I am constantly yearning for more stillness, seeking out more gaps. And so I was interested to see what Iyer, ex international travel writer and giver of TED talks had to say in his slight TED inspired book (written he tells us deliberately short so we can read it in one sitting and get back to our busy day). Stillness is, you’ve guessed it, great for you, he says. Travelling Nowhere is the new trip abroad. There is more beauty in exploring one place over and over throughout the seasons than constantly looking for a new hit day after day. I resonate with that. Stillness is not filling the gaps.

But here is where I get a little pissed off. I’m well over half way through his treatise on stillness and Iyer has shared examples of Leonard Cohen and his Japanese abbot Joshu Sasaki, Mark Rothco, John Cage, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, Henry David Thoreau, Marcel Proust, Matthieu Ricard … I’ll stop there – see a pattern ? All men. He does assign a reasonable word count to Emily Dickinson, but the example of a woman who rarely left her home, listening behind closed doors to her brother carrying out an adulterous affair, writing of death, does not feel like a particularly desirable version of ‘still’ to aim for.

Perhaps the book will take an about turn and I will be inundated with examples of stillness in female form in the final third, but I don’t hold out too much hope.

Is Iyer’s lack of examples of still, zen women merely showing a gender bias in his writing? Or are females less still? Are we meant to be still? Are we just crap at it? Does stillness look different for women and men? Is feminine energy all about movement? I’ve lots of questions. Not all the answers. But here’s some thoughts.