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ON TO WHAT’S NEXT...

If the mind is disciplined, the heart turns quickly from

fear to love.

—JOHN CAGE

he stakes of what each of us is trying to do are too high to allow
ourselves to be riven by the chatter of the news or the noise of the
crowd. The insights we seek are often buried and rarely obvious—to
find them, we need to be able to look deeply, to perceive what others
are unable to.
So we ignore the noise. We zero in on what’s essential. We sit
with presence. We sit with our journals. We empty our minds.
We try, in the words of Marcus Aurelius, to “shrug it all off and
wipe it clean—every annoyance and distraction—and reach utter
stillness.” To build a kind of mental vault or stronghold that no
distraction or false impression can breach. For brief moments, we
are able to get there. And when we’re there, we find ourselves
capable of things we didn’t even know were possible: Superior
performance. Awesome clarity. Profound happiness.
Yet that stillness is often fleeting. Why?
Because it is undermined by disturbances elsewhere—not just the
expected turbulence of the surrounding world, but also inside us. In
our spirit and our physical bodies.
“The mind tends toward stillness,” Lao Tzu said, “but is opposed
by craving.” We are like the audience at Marina Abramović’s
performance. Present for a moment. Moved to stillness for a