Stillness

In my early 20s, I gave tours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I co-taught this series called “The Observant Eye,” during which we spent our Friday evenings looking at a single artwork for one hour. On folding chairs, we’d look at Dutch still-life paintings and Northern Renaissance portraits, Baroque sculptures and ancient Chinese scrolls. We’d spend the first minutes observing the given artwork in silence, and then share what we noticed, what caught our eye: a protruding vein on a hand, a curled toe, an open door. From there, a conversation would fluidly build; we’d reach collective epiphanies and uncover historical lessons by simply looking at the artworks for what sounded like an inordinate amount of time — most people on average don’t observe an artwork for longer than 20 seconds — but we always wrapped up the hour with more to say.

“The Observant Eye” became, for its regulars, a sacred ritual, a time for pause in a city that didn’t nurture pause, a balm in the frenzied pace of our urban and digital lives. But this need for stopping and contemplation is not only a contemporary one, as evidenced in those artworks in the galleries, many of which were centuries old and made with the intention of being pondered in the dark corners of churches and chapels.

It’s helpful to have a framework, a structured environment, for marinating in stillness. It can feel uncomfortable and unnatural to just sit, absorb and not move. Meditating on a yoga mat has never worked for me personally, but I can stare at a painting for 60 minutes in a museum.

The stories in this issue journey through various environments that encourage or require stillness — from the hot tub at the spa to the temple and even the dentist’s chair. If there’s one thing these spaces hold in common, it’s that they remove us from our routines through a shift in temperature, a vibrant color, an absence of sound. At the Met, I felt this shift as soon as I walked through the entrance hall and saw the fresh flowers spilling out of the tall ceramic vases.

It wasn’t only the artworks that I came for on Friday evenings. It wasn’t even the conversations (though they were nourishing too). It was mostly for the feeling that came over me after having stared at the cracks in the oil paint or the slippery shadows on chunks of marble — as though my eyes had been washed and they were finally seeing, not thinking. When I walked toward the exit, past the flowers and into the night, I felt for a moment a kind of clarity.

Elisa Wouk Almino
Editor in Chief

Image logo by Angelica Baini For The Times