You need one small room for yourself. This is very true: when you can really find yourself in a small room, then there is you yourself, and the whole universe is there, and the whole universe makes sense to you. Without your one small room, the whole universe doesn’t make any sense. So what you need now is a small room, and what you will need after your death is a small stone. That is the actual reality, which is always true for everyone.

Shunryu Suzuki, Becoming Yourself: Teachings on the Zen Way of Life p.32

I have grown increasingly to love my own small room. It has become soaked, somehow, at least in my own feelings, with the hours I have  spent there, and the changes I have seen in myself and in the seasons – in the years now, in fact – the trees growing and changing, generations of blackbirds coming and going across the lawn.

Strangely, though, I’ve also come to notice that the room travels with me. If I am aware enough of where I am, of the light moving across the floor, my own breathing in its little tides and intervals, then my own little room can be in a hotel, even a train seat or in an airport among all the other displaced travellers who wait with me, Stillness isn’t a thing you need to find so much as that you just need to step into, opening the  door and closing it behind you gently.

Perhaps the strangest thing I have found is that this small room of stillness is there, almost clearer and almost more precious somehow, in those times when the usual patterns of volition, of self-determination, seem to be lost, and whatever baneful thing is in the air has, finally, hit the fan.

If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn’t a problem. The mind didn’t have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over. This is why there are many reports of ordinary people suddenly becoming capable of incredibly courageous deeds. In any emergency, either you survive or you don’t. Either way, it is not a problem.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now p.65

Suzuki’s paradoxical remark about the universe begins to make sense. It is within now, as Tolle himself says, that what is is all there is. For once, we have dropped into the stillness that has lain beneath all that has come to be, and is beneath all that is becoming now. All the myriad contrivances of thought have dropped away; what is left is no thing – it is the ground itself, bright and unending.