Pico Iyer, the author of The Art of Stillness, speaking at the India Today Delhi Conclave 2026, said that stillness is not a luxury but an essential capacity in a hyperconnected age.
“I want, when I’m speaking to you, to be entirely with you,” he said, explaining why he avoids a mobile phone and why attention, not speed, is the scarce resource.
His travel life, he argued, has always been less about movement than about making sense: “Travel is just a costume I put on now and then.”
Iyer described stillness as the place where experience is converted into insight. He recalled leaving Midtown Manhattan for Kyoto and living in a single room without comforts, which taught him how “to turn the many sites you’ve accumulated into insights.”
The pandemic, he said, was an enforced retreat that helped many remember what mattered: family, friends and health.
TECHNOLOGY, ATTENTION AND WISDOM
He warned that technology supplies data but not wisdom.
“It can give us information but not knowledge and not wisdom,” he said, urging people to schedule analogue pauses such as an internet Sabbath.
Small choices matter, he added, quoting William James: attention is a choice; what you attend to shapes your life. Even twenty minutes of quiet each morning, Iyer suggested, could transform the rest of the day.
PRACTICAL ROUTINES FOR STILLNESS
Practical steps are simple: take long walks, meet a friend without a phone, and “make appointments with yourself.”
He described how an Indian friend at Google set aside an hour weekly to meet himself.
Daily rituals, the first twenty minutes of the day and the last two hours of the evening, set the emotional tone, he said, and reduce the reflexive busyness that erodes clarity.
STILLNESS, LEADERSHIP AND CREATIVITY
Iyer argued that leaders and creators need stillness to think outside groupthink.
He pointed to examples of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Philippe Starck, who deliberately clear time for reflection.
“The slower we move, the richer and deeper the product we will make,” he said, invoking the Tibetan image of digging one deep well rather than many shallow ones.
SILENCE AND HUMANITY
Silence, he added, binds people beneath competing ideologies. He told how years of travel with the Dalai Lama taught him that daily meditation prepared the leader to meet every person fully.
Silence, Iyer said, “Speaks to me as no scripture ever could.” It restores perspective, helps us see the larger arc of history and supplies the inner resources we will need in crisis.
He urged listeners to adopt small habits, a weekly internet Sabbath, twenty minutes of morning silence, or a monthly retreat, not as austerity but as a practical investment in clarity, empathy and creativity that replenishes attention and strengthens the inner reserves needed for life’s inevitable emergencies.
For Iyer, stillness is not withdrawal but a way to return to the world attentive, generous and effective. By choosing where to place our attention, he argued, we recover the wisdom that machines cannot supply.
