Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

Fyodor Dostoevsky once described his wife, Anna, as a rock on
which he could lean and rest, a wall that would not let him fall and
protected him from the cold. There is no better description of love,
between spouses or friends or parent and child, than that. Love,
Freud said, is the great educator. We learn when we give it. We learn
when we get it. We get closer to stillness through it.
Like all good education, it is not easy. Not easy at all.
It’s been said that the word “love” is spelled T-I-M-E. It is also
spelled W-O-R-K and S-A-C-R-I-F-I-C-E and D-I-F-F-I-C-U-L-T-Y,
C-O-M-M-I-T-M-E-N-T, and occasionally M-A-D-N-E-S-S.
But it is always punctuated by R-E-W-A-R-D. Even ones that end.
The stillness of two people on a porch swing, the stillness of a
hug, of a final letter, of a memory, a phone call before a plane crash,
of paying it forward, of teaching, of learning, of being together.
The notion that isolation, that total self-driven focus, will get you
to a supreme state of enlightenment is not only incorrect, it misses
the obvious: Who will even care that you did all that? Your house
might be quieter without kids and it might be easier to work longer
hours without someone waiting for you at the dinner table, but it is a
hollow quiet and an empty ease.
To go through our days looking out for no one but ourselves? To
think that we can or must do this all alone? To accrue mastery or
genius, wealth or power, solely for our own benefit? What is the
point?
By ourselves, we are a fraction of what we can be.
By ourselves, something is missing, and, worse, we feel that in
our bones.
Which is why stillness requires other people; indeed, it is for
other people.