In 1990, as towering flames closed in around his California home, author Pico Iyer picked up his mother’s cat and ran to the car, hoping to escape the raging wildfire. He soon realized they were trapped—fire ahead, fire behind, with no way out. Death seemed inevitable, until a Good Samaritan appeared. Having spotted the fire from the freeway, he drove his water truck up into the hills toward the blaze, ready to help.
“He wasn’t a monk or a holy person necessarily, but he was a good person. And his commitment to goodness saved my life.”
Those are Pico Iyer’s words to me as he described the wildfire that destroyed his home and nearly took his life.
After the fire, and after sleeping for weeks on a friend’s floor, Pico found silence and rest at “a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California.” He’s returned to the solitude of the monastery more than 100 times.
Life is full of devastation and loss and beauty and goodness. How do we hold it all together? What can solitude give us after a catastrophe?
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Pico joined me on the podcast to explore these themes at the heart of his latest book, Aflame: Learning from Silence. He reflects on his time spent in monasteries and how he grounds the ethereal idea of silence in the very earthy realities of everyday life—life filled with deadlines, relationships, and the (sometimes devastatingly) unexpected.
I asked Pico why he wrote this book at this time, and he gave three reasons: distraction, division, and despair.
He says:
“I’ve never seen the world in such a state of distraction…
“I’ve never seen the planet and our nation so furiously divided…”
“I’ve never heard my friends so despairing and so anxious as they are now in the midst of climate change and wars and technologies that are racing out of our control.”
He then went on to detail why devoting time to silence and solitude is especially important in light of these three realities. I hope you’ll listen to (and share) this conversation, which is full of his wise and beautiful insights.
How to Return to Stillness and Silence
At one point, I asked Pico for some practical ways to return to stillness and silence for those of us who aren’t able to take regular retreats to monasteries. Here are four practices he incorporates into his life:
1. Find places of silence close at hand.
He says:
“Take a walk or go and see a friend without your cell phone or just sit quietly in your room for 20 minutes every morning without your devices. If you’re in a busy city, step into a church. Or go for a walk along the river. The beauty of silence is it’s available to everybody. It’s non-denominational. And it’s available at some level wherever you happen to be. It is a kind of medicine that’s going to help you deal with the clamour of the world.”
2. Practice Lectio Divina.
Pico says he spends 15 minutes at the start of each day reading and meditating on something that speaks to his soul, such as writings from monks or poets.
“It sets the tone, like striking a bell at the beginning of the day. Everything that follows is only going to be as rich as the extent to which I’m grounded. And everything in my outer life is only going to be as deep as my inner life is.”
3. Give undivided attention—read a book.
Every afternoon, after spending five hours at his desk, Pico spends an hour immersed in a book—either a novel or a thoughtful work of nonfiction. He says that after that hour “I can tell I’m much deeper, more nuanced, more attentive. I’m a much better version of myself just by giving my undivided attention.”
4. Instead of killing time, restore it.
Pico began a practice of turning off the lights and listening to music while he waited for his wife to get home from work, rather than filling the time with TV or online scrolling. He says:
“Just by disabling my senses and giving myself a break and filling myself with something beyond the reach of words, I was amazed I felt so much fresher. I slept much better. I woke up much less jangled. Instead of using that time fruitlessly, I’m actually restoring myself in some way I can barely explain, but I can feel that listening to the music is going to be better than filling myself with the latest tweets or updates from CNN.”
After you listen to (or watch) this episode, let me know what you think. How have you incorporated silence and solitude as regular rhythms into your life? You can reply to this email or leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you, and please share the episode with someone who could use these words of hope in our distracted, divided, despairing world.
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