Louis Vigo’s Reviews > Stillness Is the Key > Status Update

Your job, after you have empties your mind, is to a low down and think. What’s important to you? What’s actually going on? What might be hidden from view? What might the rest of the chessboard look like? What is the meaning of life?

Slow Down, Think Deeply. Fred Rogers framed a print, “L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux”. What’s essential is invisible to the eye

The mind is an important and sacred space. Keep it clean and clear with a kind of gentle and persistent sweeping. Protect it from yourself, from your own thoughts. Don’t just guard your mind from what goes it it, but also from what goes on in it. “Chop wood, carry water. Chop wood, carry water”. Don’t over analyze. Do the work. Don’t think. Hit the ball.

Man is a thinking reed. ...But his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. ‘Childlikeness’ has to be restored with long years of training in the art is self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think. — DT Suzuki

Be still. Be still... and be in charge of your own information diet

Walker Percy in book Lancelot. “Yes. It was possible to stand. Nothing happened. I listened. There was no sound: no boats on the river, no trucks on the road, not even cicadas. What if I didn’t listen to the news? I didn’t. Nothing happened. I realized I had been afraid of silence”

The way you feel when you wake early in the morning and your mind is fresh and is yet unsoiled by the noise of the outside world—that’s space worth protecting. So too is the zone you lock into when you’re really working well. Don’t let intrusions bounce you out of it. Put up barriers. Put up the proper chuting to direct what’s urgent and unimportant to the right people

We do not live in this moment. We, in fact, try desperately to get out of it—by thinking, doing, talking, worrying, remembering, hoping, whatever. We pay thousands of dollars to have a device in our pocket to ensure that we are never bored. We sign up for endless activities and obligations, chase money and accomplishments, all with the naive belief that at the end of it will be happiness

The lesson [of JFK and Khrushchev] was not one of force but of the power of patience, alternating confidence and humility, foresight and presence, empathy and unbending conviction, restraint and toughness, and quiet solitude combined with wise counsel.