Stillness

More from getting the king out of the garden

Stillness is not something I paid much attention to when I was younger. Silence often felt like wasted time, and stillness usually meant something wasn’t happening that probably should be. Life was about movement, activity, and getting on to the next thing.

Somewhere along the way, that began to change.

I’ve noticed that stillness has a presence all its own. It isn’t empty, and it isn’t passive. It has a way of revealing things that stay hidden when life is busy. When everything slows down, thoughts that have been sitting quietly in the background finally have room to surface.

Stillness doesn’t always come easily. Sometimes it only appears after exhaustion, loss, or frustration. At other times, it arrives unexpectedly — a quiet morning, a walk in the woods, a pause between tasks, a moment when nothing demands attention. Those are often the moments I’m most tempted to fill with something distracting or a small project.

I’m learning that stillness isn’t about doing nothing. It’s about not forcing anything. Letting things be unfinished for a while. Letting questions remain unanswered. Trusting that understanding doesn’t always come through effort.

There’s also a difference between being alone and being still. A person can be surrounded by others and still experience stillness, or be completely alone and never find it. Stillness seems to have more to do with where the mind settles than where the body happens to be. It’s often in stillness that the Spirit speaks quietly through the heart.

Some of the clearest moments I’ve had didn’t come from thinking harder, but from stepping back. When the surrounding noise quiets, perspective has a way of returning on its own. Not all at once, and not dramatically — just enough to see what matters and what doesn’t.

Stillness also allows for daydreams that have a language all their own — a kind of quiet communication that rises from the subconscious. This language doesn’t belong only to nighttime dreams, but to waking moments as well. If one learns to pay attention to that language, it can begin to reveal where a person is on this journey called life.

I don’t think stillness is something that can be chased. It has to be allowed. And when it is, it often leaves things a little more ordered than it found them.