The idea behind choosing to sit still long enough to learn about yourself is simple and has been around for ages. вЂњThere is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.вЂќ - Shakespeare in Hamlet Going nowhere вЂ¦ isnвЂ™t about turning your back on the world itвЂ™s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply. Too many of us see going nowhere as turning away from something rather than turning towards something. He nowhere I was interested in had more corners and dimensions than I could possibly express to him (or myself), and somehow seemed larger and more unfathomable than the endlessly diverting life IвЂ™d known in the city. Our educational institutions tend to tell us the point of life is to get somewhere, not to go nowhere.

More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk. WeвЂ™ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off - our holy days, as some would have it our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night.

We have the sense, too often, of running at top speed and never being able to catch up. The modern diet is a wonderful cocktail of movement and stimulation.ДЄfter a thirty-year study of time diaries, two sociologists found that Americans were actually working fewer hours than we did in the 1960s, but we feel as if weвЂ™re working more. This is largely a recipe for ensuring we will never be happy. Today weвЂ™re going faster and faster in search of contentment and meaning. The adventure of going nowhere but inside ourselves. The Art of Stillness is a persuasively argued case for the pleasures of slowing down and being in one place. вЂњSitting still,вЂќ writes Pico Iyer in The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, is вЂњa way of falling in love with the world and everything in it.вЂќ

Ted talk the art of stillness