Written By - Sumita Sarkkar
While being still in a world that never stops has become an arduous task, the hardest part of being still is, perhaps, not the silence itself. It is what the silence begins to say.
Once you have mastered the art of silence, certain thoughts and questions that we have been avoiding or are too busy to notice, emerge. So, when the noise finally settles, we are sometimes confronted by thoughts we have been too busy to hear.
It could be a question we have postponed, a grief we hid under the garb of strength or disguised it as productivity at work, a dissatisfaction we have mistaken for ambition, or a relationship we have outgrown. Or maybe, just maybe - a version of ourselves we have been carrying long which may not be true.
Oftentimes, most of us return to the noise, because it is more convenient to run away from the ‘scary’ questions (read reality). It may not always be because we love the noise, but because it protects us from ourselves.
We fill our calendars, our conversations and our screens because constant movement can create the illusion that we are moving forward. But movement and progress are not the same thing.
Have you noticed that a person can be extraordinarily busy and still be going nowhere? Stillness interrupts that illusion. It asks a difficult question that we would rather conveniently ignore - If there were nothing to prove, nothing to achieve and no one to impress, who would you be? And most people don’t have any answer to this uncomfortable question.
Perhaps we are uncomfortable because much of our life today is built around identity as performance. We become our professions, our achievements, our possessions, our social identities, even our struggles.
We often say, “I am busy. I am important in my organization. I am successful.”
But we refuse to see another self — quieter, less decorated, and perhaps more authentic. Only stillness gives that self a voice and what it says may not always be what we want to hear. It may tell us that some of our goals were inherited rather than chosen, some of our success stories are what others tell us or that what we want others to know, that some of our desires were out of sheer comparison. And most important - some battles we are fighting are no longer worth winning.
On the brighter side, stillness also reveals something beautiful - that we already have enough, that the ordinary morning we barely noticed was actually a life moment and that the person sitting beside us deserves more attention than the thousands of people we scroll past.
It reveals that happiness is not always waiting at the end of achievement. Sometimes it is hidden inside an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon, a shared laugh, sunlight entering a window, or the simple luxury of having nowhere else to be.
And this is perhaps this is the deeper purpose of stillness. It is not for making us less ambitious. But to help us distinguish ambition from emptiness, solitude from loneliness, and movement from meaning.
The world will continue to rush. Notifications and deadlines will continue, but we have the choice to let its speed determine the speed of our soul, because the bravest thing we can do is - not to keep going but to stop, pause for a while, and listen.
The biggest courage is to change when the silence tells us that the life we are living is no longer the life we truly want.
(The author is a seasoned journalist, life coach, into alternate healing therapies, nutritionist, fitness and adventure sports enthusiast, and long-distance runner)
