Outlook Anniversary Issue: Our Unseen Sanctuary, Finding Calm Within Chaos

It was pitch-black on the mountain road through Yemen, and the driver and I had just survived a swarm of teenage boys crowding round us while waving assault rifles. The rain was coming down hard and the car was swerving towards a sheer precipice. Around the next corner there were more shouting boys, more guns, more roadblocks and I had to recall—again and again—that a traditional source of revenue in these highlands is the kidnapping of foreigners. Hostages are most often released, but they can be held, sometimes for weeks, until their embassies part with a hefty ransom.

The six-hour drive across the war-torn country seemed never to end, and I soon realised that all my credit cards were worthless here. My resume was beside the point. Every one of the books I’d written was of no use at all. The only thing I had to steady myself with was whatever resources I’d gathered within.

At moments I thought back to the day when I’d stepped out onto a sunlit terrace outside the Potala Palace in Lhasa. The sky was a startling cobalt above, the snowcaps gleamed in the distance and I felt, as never before, how much I had inside me, in what felt like a space that was flooded with light with no roof to keep it from the heavens. In both instances, I’d been brought back, shockingly, to what lies beneath our external world and to an inner place that was threatened in Yemen and restored in Tibet. The imaginary place I can’t live without is, in fact, real, and is a treasure-house within I might call our Unseen Sanctuary.

This hidden space is the place where we go to calm ourselves in adversity, the place that, in good ways and bad, lies behind our many doings. It’s the chapel that belongs not to some AI future but right now, right here, though how we name or explain it may be the least important thing about it. It’s not exactly what Orhan Pamuk called his Museum of Innocence but it contains memories of some other, unfallen world we sensed in the purity of childhood. Perhaps it’s best described, seven centuries ago, by the German mystic Meister Eckhart as “the place where one has not been wounded.”

We all of us know that our actions in the world are only as wise and useful as the thoughts and intentions that lie behind them. We also know that this is something largely within our control. Our lives, as William James reminded us more than a century ago, are defined by what we choose to attend to; they’re determined not by what happens to us so much as by what we make of what happens to us. Care for that inner space, and you can bear many afflictions; ignore it, and you have to pay a terrible price.

One resident of India, the XIVth Dalai Lama, has spent his entire life working on and with his mind, in as difficult and pressured a life as I can imagine. He smilingly recalls to us, as we hurry to our health clubs, that it’s even more important to attend to fitness centres of the mind and spirit. If our bodies are weak, but our minds are strong, then not everything is lost; but if our bodies are strong while our mind is failing, we’re in serious trouble. Not to care for the Unseen Sanctuary is to end up like a car without an engine.

None of this is new, of course, but the challenge of the modern moment is that the external is everywhere, and cacophonous, drowning out the still voice of our inner lives. Texts, updates, notifications, snippets of news are streaming in on us till we’re hostage to the turbulence of the moment and can hardly recall—or recover—what lies beyond and behind every moment. We’re so captive to the latest tweet that we lose all sense of a larger picture.

In 2023 the US Department of Labor sent out a survey. Seventy-nine per cent of respondents—more than three in every four—acknowledged that they never had a single moment in which to rest or to think. If we’re unrested and thoughtless, we’re never going to make either clear or constructive decisions.

It’s wonderful to have imaginary places to which we can retreat, for solace or inspiration; as a child, I delighted as much as any of my friends did in Narnia and Earthsea and Middle Earth, and later on, as a student, I was diverted by each of Italo Calvino’s invisible cities and Jorge Luis Borges’ speculative enquiries. Our fictions offer a welcome alternative when life itself proves too chaotic or too painful. But no imagining has ever been for me so rich or so vital as reality, and everyday life has surprised me at least as often as fiction does.

As a writer, my job is to keep my eye fixed on what is really happening around the world, not on what might happen or what I wish might come about; and as the years go on, I see with more and more immediacy how little I can know of what will take place next week, or even tomorrow. My interest is in what kind of medicine we can put to use today.

Put differently, I’m obliged to ask: what do you have to bring to the intensive care unit? At some point you—like most of those you love—will find yourself in an emergency room. As on that mountain road in Yemen, your business card, your curriculum vitae, your achievements in the world will not be any help at all; the only thing you’ll have to draw upon is your inner savings account, whatever resources you’ve gathered in that Sanctuary within.

Once I’d woken up to this truth, I started going on retreat for three days every season: to restore my inner landscape, to hear something deeper than the chatter all around and to ensure that I wasn’t waylaid—or hypnotised—by the latest newsflash or social media update. Two days after I drive back into the world after each retreat, I’m cursing again—of course!—that driver in the next lane, fretting over taxes, as distracted and unexalted as ever. But some residue of the quiet remains within me, like the money I deposit in my visible savings account. And like those tangible resources, it grows incrementally, and with compound interest. If I devote just three per cent of my days to my inner life, it transforms the other 97 per cent and becomes the best investment I will ever make.

And if I devote just 20 minutes every morning to sitting quietly in one corner of the room without any devices—or taking a walk around the neighbourhood, effectively paying a visit to my Inner Sanctuary—that too amounts to a mere three per cent of my waking hours, though it can revolutionise the other 97 per cent. The only way I can begin to understand the world—to see it in its proper proportions—is by stepping away from it; and the only way I can begin to gather the resources I’ll need to have something to offer it is by entering my Unseen Sanctuary, to build up my reserves.

Indeed, the secret surprise of retreating within is to register that solitude is the best place and way to remember what you love, and so to come to a deeper understanding of both community and compassion. It’s only by withdrawing a little from the frenzy that I can recall what really matters and make sure that I’m doing justice to it.

The world has never seemed so fast or furious as it is right now, between climate crises and wars, runaway technologies and turbulent politics; anyone reading this piece was lucky to have survived a recent worldwide plague. We all know that further earthquakes, wildfires and floods are on the way. We’ve never been so desperately in need of an Unseen Sanctuary that can sustain us at moments like the ones in Yemen, and come back to us, a flood of hope, when we step out on a terrace in Tibet.

This place belongs to all of us, but we have to tend it as carefully as we would any garden, or chapel. On it depend our welfare, our clarity, our peace of mind. Neglect it, and you’ll find yourself borne helplessly along the tides of distraction and wondering how you can ever find your way back to shore. In the end, the Unseen Sanctuary is a place that has to be believed in to be seen.

Pico Iyer is a novelist, essayist and travel writer. He is the author of more than a dozen books which have been translated into 23 languages. His most recent book is Learning From Silence. Since 1992, Iyer has spent much of his time at a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California, and most of the rest in suburban Japan