Stillness Is the Key summary

One day in Rome, in the first century CE, the power broker, playwright, and philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca was trying to work. 

It wasn’t easy. The noise in Seneca’s environment was unrelenting. Beneath his room was a gym, where athletes grunted and groaned, their weights banging and clanking. Out in the street, dogs barked and vendors shouted their wares. 

As though this external ruckus weren’t enough, Seneca was also plagued by a cacophony of concerns. His finances were under threat, his enemies had pushed him out of political life, and he was losing favor with his patron, Emperor Nero. All in all, it was not a situation conducive to getting much done, let alone engaging in activities of intellectual value like deep thought, creativity, or decision-making.

Seneca’s problem – struggling to find stillness in a very unstill world – probably sounds familiar. In our time, things are even noisier. To the banging and barking of Seneca’s environment, we can add loud phone conversations, cars roaring by, planes overhead. Depending on where you live, there may not be so many vendors shouting their wares, but now we’ve got overflowing inboxes and unceasing social-media notifications, an eternal chorus of pinging and dinging and ringing.  

So – what can you do? Seneca, for his part, found peace amid the noise by embracing stillness. 

So what is stillness? 

Have you ever concentrated so deeply that, as though from nowhere, like a bolt from the blue, a burst of insight suddenly struck you? That is stillness. Or have you stepped in front of an audience and poured months of practice into a single, powerful performance? That is stillness. Have you watched the slow rise of the morning sun and been warmed by the simple fact of being alive? That is stillness. 

As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke puts it, in a state of stillness, we are “full, complete" – and “all the random and approximate [are] muted.” Seneca was able to find this stillness, to “mute” his inner and outer environments, and, though plagued by troubles and distractions, find the serenity to write incisive, powerful philosophical essays that have influenced millions and millions of people.

Seneca believed that if people could find peace within themselves, all else would be possible – thought, work, a good life – even if the world around them was at war.

Seneca lived thousands of years ago, but the power of stillness abides. Around the world, philosophers and religions have embraced stillness, calling it by many and various names: upekkha (Buddhists), aslama (Muslims), aequanimitas (Christians), apatheia (Stoics). (Apatheia, by the way, which is the root of the word apathy, doesn’t mean listless or apathetic or emotionless. It means to be undisturbed by passion – in a good way. Equanimity might be the best translation, a kind of emotional stillness.) 

Point is, under different names, in different guises, stillness can be found all around the world, and all throughout history. In this Blink, we’ll explore how to find it for ourselves.