I’m not quite sure at what point stillness became stagnation, but every passing month, week, day, hour, minute and second unlocks new depths of it. It’s the kind of quietness I didn’t know the mind, body and heart could endure because, like most people, I’ve never even envisaged, let alone experienced, this degree of stasis before.
Some days my mind seems to defy my physical state. It moves fast and travels far, producing a seemingly never ending flow of ideas and thoughts that delight and sometimes overwhelm me. And some days, like today, I can’t coax out a single one. On these days, when my mind feels like a vacuum, I sink into a deeper awareness of the stillness itself.
Sometimes it feels like heavy muscles or taking an unsatisfying breath or eating food that isn’t properly salted. Sometimes it feels peaceful like a cup of perfectly brewed coffee, reading a really good sentence or going for a walk on the first spring day.
How we arrive at stillness influences how we metabolize it. Stillness by choice is one thing, usually a great thing. Imposed stillness is quite another.
Somewhere in the collective consciousness exists this mythical truth that stillness fosters clarity, that when we stop distracting ourselves from ourselves we can often see who we are, the people around us and the lives we lead more clearly.
Sometimes too clearly for comfort.
The last however many months have been marked by a penumbra of unease, which has made it both excessively easy and unbearably difficult to see ourselves, the people around us and the lives we lead plainly.
Some days it’s really easy to pinpoint how we’re feeling, what we want, what we’d like to change and what we’re able to achieve. Other days are not like that. Sure, we all felt this way in pre-quarantine times. But the time, energy and attention we can devote to these thoughts amplify the emotional effect of them by anywhere from 3 to 9,867x.
I’m not quite sure when or how the sentiment of “life is just the stories we tell ourselves” entered my mind, but it’s been unexpectedly mirrored back to me by different prominent authors recently. Joan Didion began The White Album with a version of that phrase, I lent out my copy so I can’t confirm but I’m pretty sure Italo Calvino referenced it in his posthumously published book Six Memos for the Next Millennium and I recall Yuval Noah Harari saying something along the same lines. It’s led to a number of questions and there’s one in particular I think about often these days—especially on days like today.
How can we transform the stories of stillness we have to tell ourselves right now so that the accompanying feeling of stagnation doesn’t feel so darn heavy?
I’m not sure.
I know I’m not alone, since we rarely ever are, in my propensity to feel that understanding brings relief. “I’m not sure” is the kind of non-answer anyone who never outgrew asking “why?” can’t stand. But unfortunately, I can’t offer much more than this.
In this quiet passage of time, where the days pass slowly and the weeks quickly, maybe changing the way we understand stillness is necessary. Living in a culture that values productivity above all, perceives time as a commodity and measures beinginess in outputs makes it difficult for us to think of stillness as anything other than a burden. However, living in stillness, sometimes in complete isolation, is what allowed for thinkers and writers to generate the very ideas that color our understanding of this state of being.
I’m increasingly weary of finding the silver lining to things since doing that can undermine the difficulty of the thing itself. But I wonder if stillness isn’t the real culprit here, maybe it’s the way we’ve been told these stories. Inevitably, our minds have been and will continue to be unexciting places to exist in from time to time—like that white background with a smudge of white paint—so I wonder if this time is calling upon us to correct the digital age’s skewed interpretation of stories on stillness. Perhaps we can find ways to fully accept the blankness so that instead of immediately saying no❤︎ to it, we can really believe ourselves when we say, okay ❤︎.
** IMAGE CREDIT: brainpowers **