There is a difference between stillness chosen and stillness imposed.
I have lived in both. I know the texture of each. The stillness imposed is the one that comes when the body finally wins the argument, when the burnout becomes loud enough that even the part of you that is very good at pushing through cannot push through anymore, and you stop not because you chose to stop but because stopping has been chosen for you by your own depleted nervous system. That stillness is not rest. That stillness is the body doing what it had to do when you would not listen.
The stillness I am practising now is different.
It is the stillness of sitting in the morning with the coffee before anyone else is awake and choosing not to fill the time. Not reaching for the phone. Not drafting the list. Not beginning the day’s work before the day has actually begun. Just sitting. Just being in the early light with the quiet and the coffee and the particular quality of a morning that has not yet been asked anything of itself.
This sounds simple. It is not simple.
Every time I sit in stillness there is a voice that tells me I should be using this time. That the stillness is waste. That a woman with things to do and people who need her and a life that requires management does not have the luxury of sitting in a chair watching the light change. The voice is old. It learned itself in me long before I was old enough to question it. It has the authority of decades.
I sit in stillness anyway.
Not always. Not every morning. Some mornings the voice wins and I am up and moving before the coffee has finished brewing, already inside the day, already managing it. But more mornings than before I sit. I let the light change. I let the coffee go slightly cold because I was paying attention to something other than the cooling of it. I let still be enough.
I am counting this as progress.
I am counting this as one of the practices of the rest of my life, the practice of choosing stillness before it is chosen for me, of learning that the quiet morning is not empty time waiting to be filled but full time that I have, for once, decided not to spend.
