Being still in order to be alive
By: Winnie Lim
Tags: Life Lessons, Travel, Meditation, Self, Life

I couldn’t fall sleep last night, so I thought of listening to a podcast. I don’t usually listen to podcasts because they make my head hurt if I listen to them through earphones. But I was alone, so I decided to play one through a speaker located far enough away from me instead.

I scanned through hundreds of episodes on “On Being”, and the one that jumped out was titled “Pico Iyer: The Art of Stillness”. Of course I had to listen to the one on stillness.

I wasn’t disappointed, because minutes in he said:

“Now, the great adventure is the inner world that I’ve spent a lot of time gathering emotions, impressions, and experiences. Now, I just want to sit still for years on end, really, charting that inner landscape because I think anybody who travels knows that you’re not really doing so in order to move around — you’re travelling in order to be moved. And really what you’re seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you’re sleepwalking through your daily life.”

You’re travelling in order to be moved. I felt a sense of recognition when I heard that, a feeling one gets when they hear something profoundly familiar gets articulated in language.

Travel has changed me, and it still does. But not in the way it used to, when I simply overloaded myself with stimuli of new sights and sounds. I have begun to go to places just to be still. I thought one could be still anywhere so I tried to be still at home. Yet there is this indescribable harmony when I am in a place that is full of stillness. Pico Iyer describes his so beautifully:

“And I got out of my car at this monastery, and the air was pulsing. And it was very silent, but really the silence wasn’t the absence of noise, it was almost the presence of these transparent walls that I think the monks had worked very, very hard to make available to us in the world… And somehow, almost immediately, it was as if a huge heaviness fell away from me, and the lens cap came off my eyes. And suddenly, I was seeing everything from great immediacy and it was almost as if little Pico had disappeared and the whole world had come in to me instead. And, I remember a Blue Jay suddenly alighted on the fence outside my window, and I watched it rapt as if it was the most miraculous thing that had happened. And then bells began ringing above, and it felt like they were ringing inside me.”

I don’t think I’ve been to a place deliberately facilitated to be spiritually still like a monastery. But I’ve come close to the stillness provided by the generosity of nature, I have felt something close to what he experienced — feeling my soul sing when all the noise that typically surrounds me falls away in reverence of natural harmony and beauty.

These moments are far and few in between, and in my regular living in cities I am led to believe that reality is harsh, quick and ugly most of the time. I forget who I am, who I can be, I get caught up in all that noise and manipulation and cruelty.

But nature is generous. It is filled with decay and killing, but balanced with aliveness and nurturing. It is harmonious, if we let it be, if we stop neglecting its existence. If we are lucky, we get to experience being surrounded by it, and with even more luck, just being with it reminds us that we are too — like a sadly forgotten fact — a part of nature.