Do not make being quiet into a task to be performed. Relax. There is nothing to practice.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

It is fatally easy to make a career out of the contemplative life. Monastics have been doing it since at least the Buddha’s day – probably far longer ago than that. It isn’t a career. The Taoist and Chan Buddhist traditions are full of stories of those who wandered “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown” (Chia Tao), away from the politics, and the academic and religious structures of their day, simply to remain still and quiet, among the comings and goings of natural things, the flow of what simply is.

Part of the trouble, it seems to me, is no more than the nature of mind itself. The self is not a settled thing, not a captain on the bridge of the mind; thoughts, feelings, longings, identities even, come and go according to circumstances, or else merely according to the restless patterns of internal weather. Nothing is fixed; intention is only a word, a flickering across unsteady waters.

To sit still enough to see this, to see that at the centre of all that calls itself the self is no thing at all, is far easier and more possible outside of the structures and expectations imposed by institutions, whether spiritual or academic. Of course, there were many contemplatives who subsisted in the cracks and crevices of the religious life, just as there are many today who find places to shelter within contemporary scholarship; the AC Graylings and Susan Blackmores, perhaps. But it seems to me that they survive – and even thrive – often in spite of, rather than because of, where they find themselves.

To live as a small shopkeeper, like Nisargadatta Maharaj, or to follow various disparate semi-careers as I have done in the past – or simply to live quietly in a retirement community as I do now, or as Joan Tollifson does these days – seems to me in most cases an easier, even sometimes a more honest, way to carry on. There is no task anyway: no goal to achieve, no position to maintain. There is only the falling away of purposeful action; the light through the trees behind the garden, the robin trying out his spring song in the chill evening air of early March. Only remain still, and quiet. All that is is given.