Pico Iyer is a British-born essayist and novelist, educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard. He is an acclaimed travel writer who began his career documenting the disconnect between local tradition and imported global ‘pop culture’.
Since 1986 he has been writing books and since 1992 he has been based in rural Japan, while spending part of each year in a Benedictine hermitage in California. He has written ten books, exploring also the cultural consequences of isolation, whether writing about the exiled spiritual leaders of Tibet or the embargoed society of Cuba.
Iyer’s latest focus is on how we can regain our sense of stillness and focus in a world where our devices and digital networks increasingly distract us.
As he says: “Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds. Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think. … All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world.”
Are you making enough time for stillness?
Also see: My Inner Sanctuary and The Need to Slow Down