The Still Point Within

“Every time I make the steep drive up the hill, I’m bringing fresh perplexities. Our daughter, Sachi, has been diagnosed with cancer and is spending an entire year in the hospital; my mother, on this side of the Pacific, has told friends that she wishes she could have thrown herself on the equivalent of her husband’s funeral pyre. How can I begin to tend to both, and be in two places at the same time?”

     Well now, that’s quite a quandary author Pico Iyer finds himself in; his seriously ill daughter is in Japan, his emotionally distraught mother is miles away in southern California, and he is feeling the weight of responsibility in his desire to attend to both of them.

     As he ponders this situation Iyer is driving to a monastery where he has often felt the peace, consolation, and clarity that silence and solitude can afford. Such places are oases of sanity in the sometimes unmanageable circumstances of our lives. It is in the embrace of their ambiance that we can find an otherwise elusive perspective on the conundrums that plague us – the right way to navigate the impossibility of being in two (or more) places at the same time.

     It is something of a luxury to extricate ourselves from the often overwhelming demands of our lives and relationships, and monastic getaways are not easily available, nor are they everybody’s cup of tea. But there is within each of us a still point surrounded by silence, so says Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjold; without going anywhere, it is to this “place” that we can retreat in the chaos that is everyone’s life from time to time.

     What strikes me about Iyer’s situation is that he is giving himself permission to retreat from the immediacy of his responsibilities in order to connect with his soul, for he knows that it is from this still point that he will emerge better able to tend to those in need of his care.

     It need not be immersion in a monastery that readies us to tackle life’s challenges. And although a few moments of silence, a few deep breaths, a brief time of quiet meditation may not enable us to master the art of bi-location, they might help us be a little less frenetic in the midst of the “fresh perplexities” that seem often to demand our attention.