How do we find calm in our frantic modern world? Tim Parks, a lifelong skeptic of all things spiritual, finds himself on a Buddhist meditation retreat trying to answer this very question. With brutal honesty and dry wit, he recounts his journey from disbelief to something approaching inner peace and tackles one of the great mysteries of our time: how to survive in this modern age. Selected from the book "Teach Us to Sit Still" by Tim Parks. Vintage Minis: Great Minds. Big Ideas. Little Books. A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us human. Also in the Vintage Minis series: "Swimming" by Roger Deakin; "Motherhood" by Helen Simpson; "Work" by Joseph Heller; and "Liberty" by Virginia Woolf.