#The art of stillness oprah how to#

One day I visited Google's headquarters to give a talk on the Dalai Lama book I'd completed and, like most visitors, was much impressed by the trampolines, the indoor tree houses, and the workers at the time enjoying a fifth of their working hours free, letting their minds wander off leash to where inspiration might be hiding. It's only by stepping farther back and standing still that we can begin to see what that canvas (which is our life) really means, and to take in the larger picture. It's easy to feel as if we're standing two inches away from a huge canvas that's noisy and crowded and changing with every microsecond. Put another way, the ability to gather information, which used to be so crucial, is now far less important than the ability to sift through it.

#The art of stillness oprah how to#

The one thing technology doesn't provide us with is a sense of how to make the best use of technology. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutesвЂЉ-вЂЉwhich means we're never caught up with our lives.ДЄnd the more facts come streaming in on us, the less time we have to process any one of them.

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. Anyone reading it will take in as much information today as Shakespeare took in over a lifetime. The amount of data humanity will collect while you're reading The Art of Stillness is five times greater than the amount that exists in the entire Library of Congress. Yet the days of Pascal and even Admiral Byrd seem positively tranquil by today's standards. Byrd spent nearly five months alone in a shack in the Antarctic, in temperatures that sank to 70 degrees below zero, he emerged convinced that 'Half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.' Or, as they sometimes say around Kyoto, 'Don't just do something. 'All the unhappiness of men,' the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal famously noted, 'arises from one simple fact: that they cannot sit quietly in their chamber.' After Admiral Richard E. In 2019 he served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton.The idea of going nowhere is as universal as the law of gravity that's why wise souls from every tradition have spoken of it. In recent years he has been featured in program-length interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Larry King, Krista Tippett, NHK World and many others, and he was once a face of Incredible India in its CNN television campaign.Д«orn in Oxford, England, in 1957, to parents (Gujurati and Tamil respectively) from Mumbai, he was educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard. He has also written many liner-notes for Leonard Cohen, the first Hart House Lecture in Toronto and a screenplay for Miramax. They have also made him a Guggenheim Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize nominee and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.Д«etween 20, Pico Iyer delivered three talks for TED, and between them they have received more than 7 million views. His books have been translated into 23 languages and both his 2008 meditation on the XIVth Dalai Lama, The Open Road, and his TED Book, The Art of Stillness, were best-sellers across the U.S. He is the author of two novels and thirteen works of non-fiction on subjects ranging from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism, from Graham Greene to Canadian visions of diversity, from forgotten nations to the 21st century global order and has published introductions to 70 other works. An essayist for Time since 1986, he has travelled to over 170 countries and is a regular contributor to The New York Times, HarperвЂ™s and more than 200 other newspapers and magazines worldwide. Pico Iyer is one of the most revered and respected travel writers alive today.