The Siren's Call: Stillness, where art thou?

Writers continually revisit this subject under many guises -- in biographies of spiritual figures, foodie books exhorting us to relish every taste (and thus every moment) and memoirs of personal searches like Elizabeth Gilbert's bestselling "Eat Pray Love" or Judith Shulevitz's new book, "The Sabbath World." Each of them dismantles -- easily -- the straw man argument that begins this column for a simple reason.

In a review last Sunday of Shulevitz's book, for instance, my colleague David L. Ulin points out that stillness, in keeping a day of the week holy, is a human necessity. Why? Because it enables time for insights we otherwise wouldn't have -- ones necessary to our sanity, to our self-understanding. Such inner glimpses, Ulin writes, are "easy to lose sight of . . . in contemporary culture, where it often seems as if we exist outside of time, amid the 'pollutants of communications overload,' " as Shulevitz terms it.

Shulevitz's is hardly the only new release on the topic, however, and if you're trying to fill out a shelf with other books on this theme, you might turn to two by renowned author and Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, "You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment" (Shambhala: 144 pp., $19.95) and (with co-author Lilian Cheung) "Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life" (HarperOne: 292 pp., $25.99).

The day ahead of you, the next 24 hours, isn't something to just get through, it's "a tremendous gift to us," he reminds us in "You Are Here." "I begin my day by making an offering of incense while following my breath. I think to myself that this day is a day to live fully, and I make the vow to live each moment of it in a way that is beautiful, solid, and free."

This book, slender as a breviary, elegantly describes the very act of breathing as an art, and he shows us ways to apply our full concentration, our "mindfulness," to everything we do during the day -- walking, sitting, driving your car ("the red light is not your enemy," he assures), drinking a cup of tea. The point of all this, in the end, is to measure the depth of one's commitment to that moment. "When you are holding a cup of tea in your hand, do it while being 100 percent there," he advises.

Maybe if you did, you wouldn't spill so often.

The same is true of eating, which is discussed briefly in "You Are Here" while, in "Savor," Hanh and co-author Cheung extend the quality of mindfulness to our eating habits, cultural obsessions with weight and our sense of community. How did that apple get in your hand? Did you ever think about that? Where did that cup of coffee or even that Snickers bar come from? "When we eat with full awareness," the authors explain, "we become increasingly mindful of all the elements and effort needed to make our meals a reality."

In other words, eating isn't an activity apart from the world: It is a link to it. When you realize this, you achieve not just a full belly but also compassion.

Along these lines -- of merging the mystical with the everyday -- are two other helpful new guides, David Fontana's "The Meditation Handbook" (244 pp., $19.95 paper) and spiritual teacher Osho's "The Diamond Sutra" (250 pp., $19.95 paper), both published in Britain by Watkins Publishing. A fellow of the British Psychological Society, Fontana turns to many traditions -- not only those associated with Buddhism -- to explore in a scholarly but accessible way how words fail to grasp the quality of stillness. We don't even really know the principal terms very well. What does the word "I" mean, for instance, or "stillness"? Stillness, he points out, "may suggest tranquillity, but remember that tranquillity is a state achieved in meditation on the way towards insight. So stillness is something more than tranquillity; it is insight itself."

Words, then, fail to grasp what we're really after. Similarly, Osho explains in his book that "the word 'sea' is not the sea and the world 'sun' is not the sun and the word 'freshness' is not freshness." When you tell someone about your experience at the beach, he continues, you know "perfectly well that it cannot be brought into words, it cannot be reduced into words."

What these books suggest, to me anyway, isn't that attaining stillness equals zero brain activity. Instead, it means moving into a kind of mental space in which one's mind can operate in a more meaningful way.