How To Find Calm in a World on Fire | Pico Iyer

26:31Trying to make a clearing in my mind, trying to ensure I'm not doing anything. So for example, like all of us, I'm always tempted to kill time. And then one day I thought maybe I could try to restore time in those moments instead. So every day in our little apartment in Japan, I used to be waiting for my wife to come back from work, and I never knew if it'd be 20 minutes or 70 minutes. So I'd kill time. I'd go online, even though there was nothing I was looking for. I'd turn on the TV, There's never anything to watch on Japanese TV. And then I thought, no, wait a minute. Why don't I just turn off all the lights and listen to some music?

27:08Very quiet music at first. Could be Bach or Handel or Leonard Cohen, but not so quiet music sometimes. And I was amazed just by disabling my senses and just listening to music while I was waiting for my wife to come home. I was so much fresher when I heard her key in the door. I slept so much better that day. I was so much less jangled when I woke up the next night. I tried to take walks. As a writer, I found the most important part of my writing discipline is to take two walks a day. And that's when, instead of being filled with my agenda and my notes and my outline, by kind of emptying my mind, things can come to me that are much more interesting than I would be.

27:49And that's when I can really reconceive a whole project. So I tried to go three days on retreat every season, because I worked out that's only 3 % of the days of my life, but it completely transforms the other 97%. And then picking up my friend's suggestion, I thought if I just sit quietly in my room for 20 minutes every morning without my devices, that sets a good tone for the day. And 20 minutes is again, only 3 % of my waking time, but it could revolutionize the other 97%. I don't do it as often as I would like, but it seems to me a good practice. And then maybe the last one I'll share because I know we have sort of parallel lives coming from media.

28:31And I've been making my life through writing for Time Magazine and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, everyone else for 43 years. And as a result of that, I make sure never to take in more than five minutes of the news every day. Because I know, as a working journalist, there's usually five minutes of news, and then maybe 23 hours of opinion, response, prediction, speculation. situation. And I remember during the pandemic, every day when I woke up, if I turned on the news, I would hear that maybe a thousand people had just died of the virus in Iran, or that the morgues in Bolivia were overflowing.

29:10It was really tragic material, but I honestly felt there was nothing I could do to help those people, and it left me feeling hopeless and powerless. And then I would look out the window on a radiant spring afternoon and be flooded with a sense of hope and possibility. And just as you said a minute ago, reminded of how I could be a better neighbor and son and husband and friend to the people around me. There was something I could affect. And so I thought every day I have a choice whether I will attend to what cuts me up or what opens me up. Probably if I attend to what opens me up, my day will go better.

29:45But certainly the days of everybody around me will go much better. A hundred years ago, William James said that our lives are defined by what we choose to attend to. And I think that choice is important because these days there are more and more forms of media and they're more and more deafening. We have the choice which are going to lead us towards richer, better, happier lives and which are going to leave us depleted the way junk food sometimes does. I like that five minutes of news a day. My old job, I couldn't have plus one done that. But now that I'm retired from the news business, I can feel free to agree with that advice.

30:22Coming up, Pico Iyer talks about why so many of us fear silence, the importance of caring for your mind. And that we get pretty explicit and practical about how we can use Pico's experience at the monastery to our benefit in our daily lives, even if we don't plan to go to a monastery ourselves.

30:45Let me ask you a question about silence. Why do you think so many of us fear it? You know, when I go on retreat, so many people say, you're not going to talk for 10 days? Like, how do you do that? And of course, that's not the hardest part of retreat. The not talking is really not the hard part. But nonetheless, at least in a vacuum, many people fear silence. Why do you think that is? Because we're at the mercy of our own thoughts. our own fears, of our anxieties. Whenever a great religious teacher goes out into the desert, demons jump out at him as much as angels do. And when we're at the mercy of our mind, that's when the dark things and the shadows come as much as the epiphanies.

31:28And you know as a meditator that meditation is about sitting there when storm clouds pass through the mind as well as when the sun comes slanting through. So it is scary. And one reason I really admire my monk friends is that I go there and spend three days there and then return to my busy life. They have committed to spending every day of their lives alone in their cells much of the time, probably with their fears and their doubts and their frustrations. And there's nowhere for them to run and nowhere for them to hide. And as you say, silence isn't always a friend. It can be the worst of enemies.

32:05I will say, again, as we were talking about before, that the silence I find in a monastic setting is much safer, more comforting, and I think more benign than the silence I would find if I just sat in this room right now with the traffic going past and in the middle of a town. It is a particular kind of silence, but nonetheless, it too can be a minefield. So I completely understand why people are scared of being silent, why they're scared of being with themselves, and were they scared of meditation. I remember, actually, I mentioned in my book how I once met a very sweet but troubled friend, and I said to her, maybe you'd like to come and try and stay in the place where I go up north.

32:47So she came up, and we walked around the little chapel together, and she was very moved, almost to the point of tears. And then we came and started walking down the road, and we sat on a bench. And she looked at me, and her eyes were flooding. And she said, this really moves me more than I can say. But I'm envious because you, Pico, seem to really enjoy being alone and being quiet. I am terrified, and I feel as if everything I'm scared of comes out in this silence. And so she never returned there. And I can understand why that silence brought up to the surface everything that she probably would much rather keep down.

33:27And I too, my dark places, my shadows, my fears do sometimes arise, but I always feel I would rather meet them in that benign, quiet place than when I'm driving down the freeway or waiting in a long line in the bank or whatever. If nothing else, I can come to peace with them more easily in that kind of setting than in the Russian distraction of my regular days. Yeah, I completely agree with that. This is a kind of an easy thing for me to say, given that I don't have a lot of capital T trauma in my life, especially not a lot of adverse childhood events, et cetera, et cetera. So with that caveat issued, my sense is that your demons are there no matter what.

34:10So would you rather reckon with them in a supportive container at a retreat or in your daily meditation practice, or do you want to just be owned by them all the time? I know what the answer is for me. And I think, I mean, I haven't engaged in meditation, least of all the way you have, but I'm guessing in meditation, one thing that's happening is it's like watching the sky. In other words, you see the storm clouds and the storm clouds pass and the sunshine passes and everything is just constantly coming and going, that nothing is lasting for long. And that's very different from being in the regular world where you're looking up at the storm clouds and they seem to occupy everything.

34:50In other words, my sense is that meditation is partly a practice about seeing that everything is impermanent and interdependent and also not therefore taking anything too seriously. This too shall pass, which we see if ever we really look closely at the sky, we see it's in constant movement and nothing is fixed or is going to plague us till eternity. Yes, I think that is largely correct. And one benefit that can occur, especially on a longer retreat, but I think you can have this insight in your daily practice, too, is viscerally understanding this too shall pass. It's one thing to have it said to you or to read it somewhere, but to actually sit, watch your mind, notice you can go from homicidal rage to equanimity within a couple of minutes.

35:41That's incredibly empowering because then off the cushion in the rest of your life, you're not as owned or controlled by the passing squalls. Exactly. You're not attached to it, and you don't take it more seriously than you ought to. In my book, I write quite a lot about Leonard Cohen, whom I got to know when he was a monk. And he used to say wonderfully, oh, well, enlightenment is just about lightening up. In other words, about not attaching yourself so furiously to every moment. And what you were saying is so important because I think we all know that our lives are not defined by what happens to us, but what we make of what happens to us.

36:24I mean, for example, when our house burnt down, 450 other structures burnt to the ground. And I think many people understandably were traumatized for life, but others, after a few months of adjustment, actually saw that this dramatic change could open doors as well as close them and make things possible that might not be otherwise. Just as during the pandemic, almost everyone was going through much the same kind of situation and unsettledness, but some people saw it as an opportunity and some people saw it only as a catastrophe. And so again, to some degree, not entirely, but maybe more than we suppose, we have the chance to think about how we respond to everything that happens to us, including the many distractions you were talking about.

37:10In Japan, where I live, they say, take care of the mind and you take care of the world. It goes back to what we were saying before with Meister Eckhart, that the world is never our problem. It's our thoughts about the world that tend to get us in a turmoil. Well, but that also, that expression, that Japanese expression, take care of the mind, you take care of the world, also goes right at the self-indulgence argument that it's selfish to take care of your mind or to go on retreat, but actually by taking care of your mind, you are better able to be a participant in the events of the world. Precisely.

37:44I travel regularly with the Dalai Lama, and every time he comes to Japan for 10 straight Novembers, I would be by his side for every minute of his eight-hour working day. And at the end of that day, I'd be exhausted just watching him go through his job, even though he is 22 years older than I am. And finally, I realized at one point, well, wait a minute, as you know, because I know you spent time with him, he never takes a break in his working day. And his host would sometimes very kindly say, Your Holiness, do you just want to be quiet for a while? Or would you like to take lunch alone? No, no, we must be together.

38:21And I would marvel at how he could be so present and so generous, and so absolutely attentive to everyone eight hours a day in his 80s, day after day. And then I recalled every morning while I was enjoying my beauty sleep and then helping myself to a second portion at the buffet breakfast, he was waking up at 3.30 and spending his first four hours every day meditating. And he has to spend those hours there because that's his job and his responsibility as a Dalai Lama. But nonetheless, less, it's by gathering his resources in those first four hours that he can be so absolutely there and give so much of his heart and attention to every last person he meets.

39:03And it's a perfect example of what you were saying. If he didn't make that investment in his meditation, I don't think he would be the radiant, compassionate, and wise person we see. And when I watch that, I sometimes would think, well, goodness, if the most busy person I know can spend four hours a day doing this. Surely I can afford 20 minutes. And although I've been daunted by formal meditation, at least 20 minutes just sitting quietly trying to empty my mind is my equivalent. And it's something I would never regret. Yeah. Just to pick up on any sheepishness you may or may not be expressing about your being daunted in the face of meditation, I am deeply influenced by a meditation teacher named Joseph Goldstein, who often says, whatever works.

39:48And so I've picked up on that spirit of dogmatic non-dogmatism. Like if what you're doing works for you, great. Joseph Goldstein is the most inspiring teacher. I was lucky enough to watch one of the events you did with him and just listening to him makes me feel calmer and clearer. Yes. Contact high. I mean, the proof is in the pudding. In other words, when you see some of the people who've given themselves to 40 years of meditation, it's hard to argue with it because they're radiating something that most of us want, which is calm in the middle of uncertainty and hope in the middle of impermanence.

40:23He's an example, the Dalai Lama is an example, and many others. And I think many of us who wonder what's wrong with us when we see that, oh, that's probably a good example to follow. Indeed. I know you've given some thought to how to take some of the lessons from your more than three decades of visiting this monastery and operationalize them in our lives, given that most of us are not going to make the investment that you've made. I would love to just kind of get pretty explicit and practical about how we can use your experience to our own benefit. You've talked about some of these like five minutes of news a day, which I love.

41:01And you've talked about this 3 % rule of, you know, like 3 % of your life is going to be on retreat and 3 % of your waking hours will be spent in a silence on a day-to-day basis. But you've also got something called the two-hour rule and the 20-foot rule. Can you say a little bit about those? Yes. And before I say that, I mean, I love this question because as you say, most people don't have the time or don't have the resources to go on retreat, let alone to a beautiful place like Big Sur. And so I always recommend, you know, take a long hike on a Sunday, go and see a friend without your cell phone, do what so many people in Silicon Valley do, which is put a mail away message on your email every Saturday or every Sunday or both of those.

41:49The two hour rule is my bungled version of what scientists could tell you better, which is just I make sure not to go online for two hours before I go to sleep. And I think that has a very positive effect on my sleep and how I sleep pretty much determines everything the next day. So if I can take care of my sleep, I'm really taking care of everybody around me. I also have a practice that many people couldn't implement, but some could. And that is I try to go as long as possible when I wake up every day without going online. Because as soon as I go online, I feel I'm in Times Square on New Year's Eve.

42:29The whole world is shouting at me in a thousand directions. Until that, I'm sort of walking along an empty beach. I'm much quieter and calmer and much more receptive to interesting things that come to me. I know people with little kids or certain kind of job, like the job you used to have, or so many jobs you have to check in very quickly. But if it's at all possible. I think none of us loses by extending the amount of time before we enter the Maelstrom, because none of us is at our best in a crowded subway station. And that's pretty much where we are, I think, when we're online and everybody roaring at us with top volume.

43:05And it doesn't usually invigorate us. I was actually doing an event just a few years ago with somebody, and this is just another example, who is an editor. And he said every day he woke up and he checked the news, and within about 20 minutes, he was raging, and he was furious. And so when anyone came into the room, they quickly left. They didn't want to spend time with him. And then he thought, well, this is really not getting me anywhere. So he decided every day when he woke up, he would read a poem or read poetry for maybe 30 minutes. And he found suddenly his wife and his kids and his colleagues were much keener to spend time with him.

43:40And there's actually an article this week in The New Yorker, which I read this morning by a professor at Harvard who said instead of checking the news every morning, she started reading classics of literature, and they gave her much more wisdom and much more fuel for the day than if she learned about the latest things that might just make her agitated. I love that. So those are a few things, but I think each person can formulate her own. And my sense is that we're in such a hurry, we often can't tell what a hurry we're in, and that most of us are longing just to implement certain practices which we could easily come up with ourselves, but we don't know where to start or we feel that we don't have time to do so.

44:23Years ago, Simone Weil, the great French wise person, said, the problem is not that there isn't bread. The problem is we don't realize we're starving. And I think most of us are starving. And once we realize that, then we can take the appropriate methods and each person will have different methods than I suggest. But I think we need to do something quite radical to break through this vicious cycle whereby we're running and running and running and we're so out of breath, we can't realize that we need to be quiet. Yes, I take that comment well, that you're throwing out some ideas, it's a venue of options, we can try them, and we may start to develop our own inner compass about what strategies really work best for us in order to not be so perpetually caught up in the maelstrom, as you said earlier.

45:15coming up pico talks about how to operationalize his learnings from the monastery into your life and travel as a tool for transformation

45:29i did want to make sure we didn't overlook the 20-foot rule what is the 20-foot rule that's a rather arbitrary one but i'm sure everybody has had the experience stepping into a museum and you find yourself in the front of a very complicated, large canvas, and you just can't make out what it's saying. And you realize you have to step back and further back and further back. And finally, maybe when you're 20 feet back, suddenly it clicks into focus and you can catch the larger picture as it were. You can see what it's communicating. If you're too close to it, you can't make out a thing. And I feel with myself and maybe with others too, I'm so close to the world and I'm so close to my life.

46:12I can't make out its proportions and I can't see what's important and what's not. And every minute there are a thousand things coming in on me and I can't sift what is trifling from what is essential. And that's why I have to step back. And when I go on retreat, what's essentially is happening is I'm remembering what I love. I remember what matters and what is essential rises to the top. Just because I'm stepping away from the rush and allowing myself to take a deep breath. And suddenly I think, well, that's my wife. That's my real obligation. And this is the important thing, not what just came over the wire six seconds ago.

46:49Traveling with the Dalai Lama, over and over I see people come to him with their really heartfelt requests, with serious problems in their lives. And as you know, he always commiserates with them with great warmth and kindness. But his answer is, take a wider perspective, see the larger picture, wider perspective in terms of time and in terms of space. And I think maybe that's what I'm trying to get at, at the 20-foot rule. If we're right up against this, we just can't see, we can't put proportions on our life. We don't have perspective. So it's as we were saying a few minutes ago, you have to step back from your life and from the world in order to see either of them.

47:28And if you don't, I'm finding with myself, I'm just sort of blindly racing around. And I realized, you know, as we're saying all this, I'm guessing almost everybody who listens to your podcast already does something, maybe meditates or has a yoga practice or plays a piano or plays tennis or sales or cooks. But whatever it is we're doing, I think the world is accelerating at such a pace that we need to do more of it. I mean, 100 years ago, JP Morgan was wonderfully saying, JP Morgan of all people, that he could never achieve in 12 months what he achieves in 10 months. And he would give himself two months off every year.

48:06And this is why Bill Gates takes think weeks, and why Steve Jobs took long walks, and why Warren Buffett clears out his calendar. Because you can't think, and you can't make clear decisions, and you can't hear intuition unless you free yourself a little bit from clutter. I just read a statistic that in response to a Department of Labor, therefore governmental study two years ago, 2023, 79 % of people said they never had a moment either to rest or to think. And if you can't rest and if you can't think, I'm not sure how much you can really give to the people around you or to your job or to the world.

48:48Even, I mean, before the pandemic, the WHO said the great predicament of the 21st century was stress. And I would say another version of that is speed and acceleration. And we're trying to keep up with machines. And I don't think humans were ever designed to live at a pace determined by machines. The only way we could do that is by becoming machines ourselves, which I don't think any of us much wants. One thing Joseph talks about a lot, this is perhaps more applicable or useful or operationalizable for meditators, but to use the feeling of rushing in your body, because if you can tune into that swarm of bees in the chest or whatever it is, to use that as a mindfulness bell to wake up and slow down.

49:31I really like that. And I try to do it. I have a lot of habit energy around rushing and have been trying and fits and starts and slowly to unwind it. Let me just keep going with your list of really, I think, very helpful practical suggestions. Another is to declutter your space as a way to declutter your mind. Can you say a little bit more about that? I'll just say, and again, I think you've made a similar trajectory. When I was 29, I was leading the life I probably would have dreamed of as a boy. 25th floor office, Midtown Manhattan, apartment on Park Avenue, very exciting job writing on World Affairs for Time Magazine.

50:15traveling the world, scintillating colleagues. And I decided to throw over my dream life and go and live in a temple in Japan. And as I said, my stay in the temple didn't last long. I felt that living in a temple in Japan would be a perfect complement to my very overstimulated high-speed life in New York City. And I also knew it's easy to give up your job in your 20s. I had no dependence. And if everything had gone wrong, I could probably have returned to New York and got another job. But I felt as soon as I got to Kyoto, every day would last a thousand hours. Every trip to the supermarket would be an adventure.

50:56And one way or another, it would expand what limited things I had learned in New York City. And although I didn't last long in the temple, I soon moved to a single room on the eastern hills of Kyoto. I didn't have my own phone, didn't have my own toilet, barely had my own bed. But it felt as if I had all the freedom and all the time in the world. And so now, again, this is not something I recommend to anyone, but it's my way that I've found suits me. My wife and I for 32 years have lived in a two-room apartment in the middle of a very boring suburb near Kyoto. I've never used a cell phone, even though I still travel all the time and I'm still a practicing journalist.

51:38I don't have a car, so it's a hundred things not to think about or worry about. We don't really have much media, so that's a release in itself. And so I found in certain ways that this relatively stripped down life opens space for so many more interesting things when, just as you were saying, I was racing, racing, racing, and putting in 18-hour days in the office on 50th and 6th Avenue. And again, each person, for example, most people couldn't survive without a cell phone because they have children or aging parents or a job that required it. So again, it's not something that I would recommend to anybody else.

52:17But in my case, I find I have enough data and distraction in my life already. What I don't have is the time and space to make sense of it. And I also feel already my attention is being cut up quite a bit, and I'm scattered. And when I talk to you, I want to be fully present. I don't want to be in a thousand places. And so anything that can make me less scattered and bring me to a point is very welcome. I'm always touched when I go on retreat. As you know, I think the monks talk about the experience of being on retreat as recollection. And I think that means two things. One, it's not some revelation.

52:56You're just remembering something that all of us knew but forgot or misplaced along the way, some wider truth that we can't see because we're running around. But also recollection suggests to me collecting all the scattered parts of yourself and bringing them together into a whole. Because when I'm multitasking and I've got many things to do this very day, I'm moving in 16 different directions. When I'm in the silence without distraction, I really feel I'm entirely present. And suddenly the world seems beautiful. And it's exactly the same world it's always been. The world is always present. It's just me who's not present most of the time.

53:33And so any correction in my life has to take place within me, not within. The world's doing fine. I just need to be awake to it, I guess. Another lesson from the monastery that I think would be readily applicable for most, if not all of us, is the restorative benefits of nature, of being outside. Even if you can't live your whole life there, you can get doses. Yes, and nature's rhythms tend to be much happier than technology's rhythms and much closer to the human pace of life. When I wrote this book, I was trying to replicate what I feel when I'm up there, which is the day lasts a very long time, partly because I have no plans, I'm not cutting it up, and I'm moving very much at a human pace.

54:20I take off my watch as soon as I'm there, and it doesn't really matter what time of day it is because I'm freed of my plans, and the day is measured by the hours. And it's very interesting, as you know, in every order, monks and nuns maintain a very rigorous discipline, five to seven times a day, often starting before dawn, and then their last prayer is late at night. And through that discipline, they find an incredible freedom, because they know exactly where they're going to be at 3 p.m. tomorrow afternoon. and by knowing it, they actually have more freedom than those of us who are trying to cram six things into every hour.

54:56So just being awake to nature, as I say, nature is everywhere around us. And when I was living in New York City, I remember when I went for a job interview in New York City, it was a very fraught time. I was 25 years old. I really wanted to get a good job and I was going from office to office. And thank heavens, at one point, I had the sense just to step into St. Patrick's Cathedral for five minutes, even though I'm not a Christian. I knew, as we've been saying, that would calm me down. It would free me from myself. There'd be nothing but the dark hush, the prayerful silence, the light coming through the windows, the flicker of the candles.

55:31That was the medicine I needed before I went back and raced to the next office. And later, when I was living in New York City, if I could sit in a park, and there were abundant parks even the middle of that busy city, everything fell into place and calmed down a little. And there were always, wherever you happened to be, as you say, nature is always present. It's just we who are not. During the pandemic, for example, I found that I couldn't go to my health club because it was closed. I wasn't traveling the way I usually would have to. And I needed exercise. So every morning, my wife and I would take a walk behind my mother's house up in the hills of California, and the sun would be rising behind the hills, flooding the slopes with golden light, and other parts of the landscape would be buried in thick fog.

56:18And I'd turn around and I'd see the Pacific Ocean in the distance, shining in the spring sunshine with the islands so clear that you could almost count the ridges in the hills. And I would suddenly think, wait a minute, this is as beautiful as Rio de Janeiro or Cape Town or Capri or any of the places I would fly across the world to see. It was right in my backyard. My parents had lived in that property for 50 years. I'd never walked to the end of the street 20 minutes away until the pandemic sort of necessitated it. And I think many of us during the pandemic had the experience of suddenly waking up and seeing, gosh, there's beauty all around us wherever we happen to be.

56:57But we're always looking to the monastery in Japan, as it were, instead of seeing down the street is a place of quiet or is a beautiful nature. And if I can just say one more thing, I was thinking about your previous question. Sorry for the long answers, but I think it took me a while to see that luxury is defined not by how much you have, but by how much you don't need. If you're satisfied your needs, you're content, and that's the greatest form of luxury. Where I live in Japan, you may have been there, there's a famous rock garden in Kyoto where there are 15 rocks, and you can't see all 15 of them from any given place.

57:35And so it's been a tempting, fascinating enigma for every visitor for 300 years. but just around the corner from where the rock garden is, there's a little water basin, and there's one Japanese character on all four sides, and there's a hole in the middle. And if you put those four characters on the hole together, it says, what I have is all I need. And I think that's kind of what all of us are aspiring to. What I have is all I need. So if we're free from the desire, the wish to have more, that takes care of many of our problems. We'll still get sick, we'll still get old, we'll still die, but on a day-to-day level, we might be much better off.

58:15And of course, that's a classic Buddhist precept. But I think it's probably something you find in meditation too, that what you have is all you need. Yes. The word travel has come up a lot in this conversation. You're, of course, a well-known travel writer. We've been focusing for the last chunk of this conversation on lessons we can learn from the monastery. But I'm wondering, does travel play a role potentially and done well in creating calm and space in a noisy world? Or is travel, as you kind of indicated in one of the paragraphs you uttered a few moments ago, or is travel definitionally the kind of clutter that in this conversation, at least we're trying to avoid?

59:05No, I love the beginning of your question that travel like anything can be a tool for transformation. I mean, I often think that when I'm traveling, I'm living much more simply. I've just got what I can carry in my suitcase. I'm freed from my usual definitions of myself. When I'm walking down the street in Port-au-Prince or Phnom Penh and somebody comes up to me, they don't care where I went to college or what job I have or which part of New York City I was once living in, they're just thinking to themselves, is this person kind? Is he honest? Can I trust him? So I think you're taken back to something much more essential.

59:40You're stripped of all the external fluff, which often distracts us or by which we define ourselves. I find I'm much more open to people when I travel because I don't have plans. If I'm walking down the street in Santa Barbara this afternoon, and a homeless person comes up to me with a request, sadly, I'll probably hurry past because I have to be somewhere at 310. If the same thing happens on the streets of Calcutta when I'm traveling, I might well stay with that person and talk to them because I don't have to be anywhere. And I'm there in order to meet this culture. So I think travel in all kinds of ways can be used to slow one down.

1:00:16Of course, if you're riding the buses of India, you automatically slow down because they're nine hours late and then they stop every three minutes. But in a deeper way, travel does a great thing because it humbles you and it leaves you at the mercy of the world. I think when I was a kid, I sort of thought, I'm the master of my destiny. I can plan everything and I can craft my life. And the older I've got, the more I find I'm sort of the servant of destiny and life has much more interesting plans for me than I ever could. and you really feel that when you travel because you're released from the illusion of control and you realize when you wake up you can't always plan your day very well and even if you do you're likely to get lost and the plan is likely to get upended so it does great things for the ego and it does good things for the heart because I think many of us can be more open-hearted when we're traveling than when we're kind of imprisoned within our daily habits at home you make a good case.

1:01:12I like it. In our remaining moments, let me just go back to the aspects of life in the monastery that I really do think can be applicable to our lives in the world. And one of them is community. Even though you're not speaking, you are living in a community. And certainly the monks are really living in a community and are doing a little bit of speaking. And we live in a lonely era where social connection, the social fabric, it's all in tatters, sadly. And I don't think it's a coincidence that we're seeing epic rises in anxiety, depression, and suicide and addiction in that context. And so I'd be curious to hear if you have any thoughts on all of this.

1:01:56Too many. But I think traditionally, whenever people have been confronted with the difficulties that life throws up, they've turned to three things, family, community, and faith. And in a place like California where I'm sitting, sadly, families were often quite fractured, community is very scattered, and faith has sometimes been lost along the way, or traditional faith is not as common as it used to be. And so, as you say, it's very easy to be lost. And I think for me, one of the really beautiful surprises of going on retreat was to see how much that solitude was indeed a gateway to a much richer sense of community and of compassion.

1:02:38You know, I'm a writer, so I usually spend eight hours a day by myself at my desk. I'm an only child. I love being by myself. And so when I first arrived in my little room in beautiful Big Sur with not a care in the world, of course I thought, this is heaven. But as the years went on, I saw first, as I was saying before, that I was thinking much more about the people I love in that environment than when I'm driving down the freeway. And secondly, that I was learning from the monks that solitude is a means to gathering more to share with other people. When Henry David Thoreau lived in a Walden pond for two years, it was not because he was a recluse or a hermit, as he says, it was because he wanted to have more to give to the community.

1:03:22And he would look after Emerson's family, and for 10 months while Emerson was traveling, he would hold melon parties, he would fix people's plumbing. The stepping away from the world was a means to being a better part of the world. And I sometimes think I might never have gotten married if I hadn't spent that time sitting silently in a cell. And it was sitting there that made me wake up to commitments and probably to what is the richest part of life and to think that the richest part of life does come in community and that being alone is only a way to be able to do richer justice to community.

1:03:59and also just understanding a little more about selflessness and service by watching the monks, seeing these people who've consecrated their lives pretty much entirely to looking after other people. They've died to themselves and they're living for everybody else. And when you see that, you can't fail but think, well, this is a better way of living than many others I've witnessed, just as with the Dalai Lama, whose instant thought always is for the other person and how he can offer medicine to that person. Pico, in closing, I like to ask two questions. Sometimes these questions provoke long answers.

1:04:35Sometimes they're very short. The first is, is there something you were hoping that we would get to that we haven't yet gotten to? No, I mean, there's so much we could talk about because I think we've had a lot of common experiences as well as common friends, but no, thank you. And then the final question is, can you just remind everybody of the name of the book we've been discussing today and also your previous works and anything else you've put out into the world that we should know about. Thank you. So my recent book is called A Flame, Learning from Silence, and it's about my first 100 retreats over 34 years with the Benedictines.

1:05:08But it's also about how to live calmly with fire, because we all know the world is on fire, literally, but also metaphorically. And we're all addressing how to remain calm in this time of unsettleness. And by chance, I flew back into California to talk about a flame the very night that flames were upending so many lives in Los Angeles down the road. Carl Gustav Jung said, the difference between a good life and a bad life is how you walk through the fire. And in all kinds of ways, I think we're more aware of that than ever. And the previous book I'd written, which is a bit of a brother book to this one, was called The Half-Knowed Life.

1:05:46And A Flame is entirely about my time with the monks. And The Half-Knowed Life is about searching for paradise in war zones and places of conflict, many of which you, Dan, will know. So I go to Iran and North Korea and Yemen and Jerusalem and war-torn Sri Lanka and many other places because I figure any glimpse of hope you can find in the middle of that harsh reality is one you could trust. I don't trust a paradise that's a golden beach in the middle of nowhere because night's going to fall and it's not going to be golden forever. But if you can find something right in the heart of Jerusalem or a war zone that offers you hope, that's something substantial.

1:06:27So both those books are, I suppose, about how to find hope in the very real world and looking at the world really closely, but never giving up faith in it. Well, just to say you've also done four TED Talks. We'll put some links to those TED Talks in the show notes for people who want to check those out. Do you have a website that we should also let people know about? Yeah, I have two websites, picoiajourneys.com and picoia.com. And I actually, I gave the concluding talk at TED last month. So I don't know when that will be posted, but there is a fifth talk specifically on silence on the way. Okay.

1:07:09All right. Well, you've given us lots to chew on here. It was a pleasure to finally meet you, albeit remotely, but truly a pleasure and I really appreciate your time. Thank you. Well, thank you. I really hope there's a time when I can ask you a million questions because I would love to hear your answers to all of these. You've been more deeply in this world and certainly in meditation than I. Thank you for all you do. I mean, I think for somebody in the heart of the mainstream media to be reminding people of this incredible resource that they have within them, I can't think of a better thing to be doing.

1:07:38So I'm so glad you've been doing it on many fronts for a long time. Thank you. I appreciate that.

1:07:47thanks again to pico ire awesome to talk to him i've followed him for years great to finally meet him don't forget if you're interested in learning how to achieve some degree of quiet in your own busy brain we've got a guided meditation that comes with this podcast episode from the great meditation teacher 7a selassie if you sign up at danharris.com you can get access to that meditation and all the bespoke guided meditations that we're dropping with our Monday and Wednesday episodes. Also, if you sign up, you get weekly live guided meditation and Q &A sessions. The next one is coming up on Tuesday, October 14th at 4 p.m.

1:08:25We do them every Tuesday at 4, 4 Eastern that is. This one on the 14th will feature both me and Seb together, which will be fun. And if you want more of me and Seb, we're doing that meditation party retreat at the Omega Institute on the weekend of October 24th. There's a link in the show notes. Seth and I will be joined by Jeff Warren and a host of Jones-Corte. It's going to be awesome. Sign up. Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

1:08:57Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.