The Art of Stillness in a Fast Paced World

This is because there is a lot blocking the view. This modern world, after all, is fast paced and demanding. You are always lacking something, no matter how arbitrary or significant the measure, and so you do what we have been told to do, force your way forward. It’s the hustle. It’s the never ending work to get the A+ or the raise or the denotation of that type of person living that type of lifestyle which keeps us showing up day after day onto the next task, the next goal, the next best thing.

If you start to look for it, you will see how your daily life is set up to keep going and pushing and doing. And if you keep looking, you will see how your daily actions maintain that hustle. When you live by the narrative of “somewhere else is better” there isn’t much room for “let me be here.”

Which is why to find stillness you need to actively create that stillness.

It takes a conscious stop. An intentional pause. Respit. Long enough to experience what is actually there in front of you-directly: your heart beating, the texture of the food on your plate, a conversation.

When you make the choice, and it is a choice, to stop, you get to see that the stillness is not so still at all but fluid. It is your mind that is still. It is your mind having arrived in the present that offers pause. It is your connection to what is in any given moment that allows you to be here instead of do more. Your attention focused on what rises and falls before you, lets you see and hear and perceive what really matters to you (not to the world around you).

Making the choice to be still requires practice and because it is antithetical to the world we exist within, it also takes patience and time and self love. But if you make room to intentionally stop, to consciously pause, to take that respite, perhaps even schedule the daily time for it, you train your body and your mind to more frequently, more consistently arrive.
In the arrival to stillness you are alive to what is directly in front of you. Being alive to what is directly in front of you helps you understand what is important. Finding stillness teaches you that your life is not something you will one day start living, but that living is something that has been there all along waiting for you to stop and notice it.

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Originally published at https://www.theartofgoodenough.com on April 30, 2022.