The Art of Silliness, that is what I thought I saw on a slender volume by Pico Iyer. I love his writing and I thought – how great, Iyer wrote a perfect book for the beach. On closer examination I saw the title was The Art of Stillness. I bought it anyway.
I connect Pico Iyer to travel writing and also to Buddhism. Although he is not a Buddhist he has written about travels with the Dalai Lama in ways that allow great insight into the teachings that allow the Dalai Lama to live a life devoted to happiness.
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”
― Pico Iyer
In many ways I wish he would write The Art of Silliness, or somebody should. We need a silliness primer. Silliness may be an antidote to our present state of upset and darkness or it may be the best definition of our times. The synonyms can be seen to be BAD – but really… Childish – that may be the best way to deal with our childish leader, we need to be silly to ; simple, that would be a far better way to explain the damage being done by the current set of lawmakers, but they are still hiding; inappropriate, not being used to grown up language can be tricky for the Leader of the Free World.
daily woodring 