The Gift of Stillness

Yesterday I went to the beach. I only had about five minutes, so I wanted to make the most of it. Really… optimize my time connecting with nature. I headed directly to the shoreline, Dr Martens still on my feet, and took a few deep breaths. When I looked down at the sand for the first time, I noticed something really special: a full, round sand dollar. I was thrilled: as a kid, I would often find little cracked pieces of these spectacular fossils of the sea, the “good” ones already having been picked over by early risers. To see one in such perfect condition is a rarity for me.

Then, I looked around. There were tens, maybe hundreds of sand dollars of varying shapes, sizes, and colors. I had walked right by them all. I was in such a hurry to “get there” that I had completely missed out on something so special and significant. 

This is how many of us live our lives. Set on optimization and productivity, that requires us to always be in a rush. And to what end? From my experience, rushing only leads to more rushing. Our end goal becomes a moving target, and then the point becomes just to remain in a state of hustle. Even if we do accomplish something meaningful to us, do we ever really take the time to give that accomplishment the honor and appreciation it deserves before moving on to the next thing?

One way to think of slowing down is the difference between driving in a car and going for a walk. When we are driving, we tend to be so focused on getting to where we need to be, and everything between us and our destination can feel like an inconvenience that is merely in the way of our goal. Walking, if we walk in a way that allows us to be present, opens up so many more realities. What felt before like an inconvenience can turn into a gift. We might notice things we hadn’t noticed before. We might discover a new coffee shop we hadn’t seen before, or notice the sand dollars painted across the shoreline.

Slowing down might also open us up to new awarenesses in ourselves. For instance, when you’re stopped at a stoplight, do you pause and look around, being in the moment, or do you grab your phone? If the answer is the latter, is that reaction coming from the same place as the need to hurry? To be busy? If we are feeling bored, impatient, frustrated, or something else, are we letting those feelings guide our whole lives into a state of stress, burnout, and over-productivity?

My next point is important: being willing to slow down is not easy. We might tend to think of slowness and rest as “the easy way out” or even attribute it to laziness - not because it is, but because of we’ve been told it is. (By who? Why, the capitalist agenda, of course!) It might cause a version of these challenging thoughts to arise - “I should be doing more”, “why did I say that stupid thing”, “I’ve got so much to get done today, I can’t waste any time!” Sound familiar? Those thoughts want us to do anything at all, because they keep us from having to think and feel the discomfort. That leads to restlessness, and restlessness puts us in a state of hurry and hustle - if we let it.

What would it be like to notice those thoughts, feelings, and urges and be WITH them rather than react to them in order to not have to experience them?

It’s hard to make a shift, any shift, but the shift of slowing down is one I think in particular goes against everything we know. We’ve been told that busy is how we’re supposed to be, and perhaps even how we prove our worthiness to the world. You’ve heard that objects in motion stay in motion, and that’s true for us as well. But we have the ability to interrupt this momentum that has been forced upon us, and we can allow ourselves to slow down.

I invite you to do the following: take a slow deep breath, in and out. Follow the journey of your breath and really feel it move through your body. Do that as many times as you like. As simple as that was, you have just taken the first steps in the direction of allowing yourself to find some rest. If it felt good, maybe you can do it again tomorrow, and then again the next time, until you have created a habit of making a container of stillness and rest for yourself every day.

I wonder, if everyone took time to slow down every day, and allowed themselves to be more present in their lives, how we would relate to each other. How we would feel about ourselves. How we might imagine and in turn, create a new world: one that invites us to experience the awe and wonder that already exists, if we just take the time to slow down and be with it.