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Writers Marcel Proust and Matthieu Ricard embarked on the greatest journeys of their lives when they turned inward.

For a writer, stillness is at the heart of the job. It’s by sitting still, alone, that writers transform action into art – capturing impressions of the world and freezing them in time.

At Iyer’s desk in Japan, he has one constant companion: the twentieth-century French writer Marcel Proust. Once a social climber and dilettante, Proust was only able to write his epic work, Remembrance of Things Past, when he withdrew from society. Sequestered and alone for years, he penned his account of nineteenth- and twentieth-century high society and wartime through groundbreaking, introspective prose.

Sitting still allowed Proust to shape the main idea behind the seven-volume novel: how a fleeting moment can become something much larger and more permanent in our minds. He explored the ways in which we analyze our experiences, inspecting and stretching them until they become the story of our lives.

About a decade after visiting Leonard Cohen and writing about his monk life, Iyer traveled to Zurich to write about the 14th Dalai Lama. There, he met another Buddhist monk and frequent traveler to Nowhere: writer Matthieu Ricard, who was translating a discourse the Dalai Lama was giving.

Ricard was an unlikely monk. The son of famous French intellectual Jean-François Revel, he earned a PhD in molecular biology studying under Nobel Prize winner François Jacob. But he left a budding career in science to move to Nepal when he was 26 – where he learned Tibetan, took on monastic robes and became an attendant and student of Tibetan spiritual teacher Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche.

Confused about why his scientist son had become a Buddhist monk, Ricard’s father flew to Nepal to find out. Their dialogue during that ten-day visit resulted in the hugely successful book The Monk and the Philosopher, in which Ricard elegantly argues the Buddhist “science of mind” concept.

Today, Ricard is described as the “happiest man in the world.” He earned the title after demonstrating a never-before-seen level of happiness during a University of Wisconsin study on positive emotions – attributed to his having meditated for over 10,000 hours. Because he travels often to deliver lectures, attend conferences, and translate for the Dalai Lama, Iyer asked Ricard how he deals with jet lag.

“For me, a flight is just a brief retreat in the sky,” he responded. He explained that because there’s nothing he can do, or anywhere else he can be but in his seat, he simply watches the clouds. This is also the metaphor Buddhists use to explain the way our minds work: while clouds may pass by, there’s always a blue sky behind them. With patience and stillness, the blue inevitably appears again.