As the Covid-19 shutdown endures in various forms, some people may find they’re settling into a slower-paced rhythm. There’s nowhere to go, nowhere to be. We might be in this liminal space for a while.
At times this stagnation fills me with horror, but I’m also trying to see the stay-at-home order as an opportunity.
Over the years I have jumped on planes and travelled across the world seeking deliberate and structured forms of stillness and contemplation, via religious communities and meditation retreats. I’ve stayed in Benedictine monasteries, Anglican religious communities, Zen Buddhist monasteries in Japan and gone on spiritual retreats in Australia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India. All are environments deliberately designed and structured to shut off as much external stimuli as possible and take people inward.
I’ve often arrived with longings that are hard to articulate; a weariness with pleasure, overstimulated, a sense that there lies something profound just beyond my reach.
Arriving at these quiet places I’ve fought hard against restlessness and agitation before four, five, six hard days in – something has happened. I’ve dropped down into stillness.
Underneath the noise, movement, entertainment, drama – the days – of our lives, is something deeper, more quiet. It’s the mysterious element that lives beneath the surface of things. It’s our hinterland, although I prefer to think of it as an ocean. The daily things that preoccupy us are the surface of this ocean: currents, waves, squalls, weather.
It’s only when we drop below the surface (something that in the last few hectic decades people have found increasingly difficult to do) that we can experience the stillness, quiet and depth of what lies beneath. A mysterious charge runs through this submerged place. Dwell there long enough and you’ll be rewarded with serenity, insights, revelation and a tranquility that’s difficult to find on the surface.
The acknowledgement and exploration of this element has traditionally been the domain of mystics and spiritual teachers. For this reason, in our secular world, the fathoms within us – and an exploration of them – have been easy to dismiss as woo-woo.
But this thinking leaves us locked in the material world. We have enough work cut out for us on the surface, with its swift currents, its system we must adapt to, its struggles and injustices that come on quickly – threatening to overwhelm us, its sensual pleasures and its strivings – desires which in turn delight and enslave us. At some point, the surface became for most people the entirety of existence. We couldn’t access the depths even if we wanted to. In pre-pandemic life strong currents swept us along, and along.
But now we must stay at home. The government has ordered us to retreat – and this might be the first and only chance we have the time and mental space to experience true and prolonged stillness, to discover this mysterious element, this hinterland that is within us all.
Once you get through the boredom and agitation, stillness is the most reliable vehicle to take you down to the ocean’s floor.
We’ve long known this (stillness is inbuilt in major religions as prayer or meditation) but, with the decline of religion, rituals of stillness and contemplation have disappeared.
Christians talk about the gifts of stillness as peace available only via Christ (“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you”).
Modern spiritual teachers talk about this stillness being found within – not through an external God figure, or even a specific practice. The only thing required is to sit quietly and wait for it to come.
“Wisdom comes with the ability to be still,” wrote Eckhart Tolle in Stillness Speaks. “Just look and just listen. No more is needed. Being still, looking, and listening activates the non-conceptual intelligence within you. Let stillness direct your words and actions.”
Even a man as urbane and cosmopolitan as the novelist Franz Kafka (frequenter of the theatre, cafes and pubs, and busy with his work at an insurance firm) wrote rapturously about stillness: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
Stillness – paradoxically – causes things to move. Feelings or ideas that were stuck become unstuck. There is a clarifying force to the insights that come along when you are still and quiet. When you just wait.
Each time on retreat I’ve expected that the insights to arise would be specific to my life and situation. But, for me, the recurring insight is this: we are all deeply connected. It’s life on the surface that keeps us separated, that situates us in false relationships of scarcity and competition with each other, that makes us feel disconnected from others, where our egos are like avatars engaged in pointless skirmishes and meaningless battles.
The quieter and stiller you get, the more you can see the interconnectedness of all things, and the wonder and beauty in small things and the natural world.
For 30 years the songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen studied Zen Buddhism, for a time living in a monastery. There were no big insights – just wonder in the everyday that comes from stilling the mind.
One of his songs, Love Itself, was about seeing motes of dust fall through a shaft of light in his room.
All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance”
In stillness, you can see and feel it all, even the dust, rolling in ecstasy at your feet.
• Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist
