I run whenever my mind can’t sit still.
Be it eagerly at five in the afternoon, begrudgingly at crack of dawn, or especially at nighttime, when the world slips under the covers to sleep, I run.
Amidst the chaos of the day and thoughts ricocheting in my noggin, running somehow makes those same thoughts sprint on treadmills of their own until they wear themselves out.
First, it’s down the porch steps I go, speeding up round the sharp curve of the street to the right. Weaving on and off the sidewalk to warm up, I pass familiar friendly houses where a kid’s bike adorns the lawn of one, and balls, pogo sticks, and toys decorate another.
Relics of movement, left behind to be still.
However, there is one house whose front porch represents a different kind of stillness. There is simply a man and his chair: a content-looking fellow in his fifties, sitting, arms relaxed in his lap, on his trusty chair.
As I zoom past, pretending to be a blur of speed, my arm finds itself as an enthusiastic windshield wiper. I yell out, “Hey, how are ya, friend?!” and we connect with our smiles and waves, acknowledging each other’s opposite states of being–moving and sitting still.
This connection fuels me no matter how many times I pass him each week. Often, we greet each other when I’m stumbling back, drenched in sweat, and an exhausted sack of bones, muscle, and skin. He is there when I leave, and there when I return, with sometimes hours in between our greetings. Always, I find him sitting still and watching the world.
How does he sit so still? How does he watch a street with so few passersby, so little movement? No phone, no book, seemingly nothing to keep his mind occupied.
I’ve been running past him for over a year now, and the same questions flood my mind each time. Lately, my life has taken a whole new meaning of busy, where I rush from one meeting to another, one type of work to another, not carving out any space in my schedule to slow down. Perhaps this sounds familiar to you–the frenetic treadmill of go-go-go.
Amidst this year of chaos, it’s taken me until a late-night run last week to realize the beauty of this man’s stillness.
The beauty of stillness is that it doesn’t have to be still.
Let me repeat: You don’t have to be physically still to calm your thoughts and carve out a place in time for your mind to rest.
I realized that this man finds his stillness in actually sitting–he observes the world and is completely present. I imagine he lives in the moment. Here and now. Now. Now. Now.
Perhaps he is reminiscing about his younger days, or watching those kids coming out to play with their toys. But perhaps he is savoring every single moment as it ticks by with him. Not as the moment passes him, but as it steps hand-in-hand with his mind.
That is what I imagine stillness to be. It is the practice of being IN the moment, immersed, and understanding that this moment is fleeting, and yet still stepping in time with it. Now. Now. NOW.
For this man, that immersion is through sitting. For me–as I found out last week–it is through running. After a whole year of zooming past him, it finally clicked that I can actually still my thoughts and focus on being the sack of bones and muscle and skin that steps in syncopated time to every stride and breath I make. It’s a delicate sensation that is almost impossible to put into sentences but tastes like the word “now.”
Why did it take my entire life up to this point to understand this notion? Was it my bias that equated mere sitting to idleness? Was it Western society’s predilection for rewarding motion and denouncing stillness? And why, after a year of repeated comparisons of me to him, motion to stillness, did I finally understand that we were both just traversing a
You see, it all clicked in a single moment. I inhaled, held that precious breath in my lungs for a moment, and found my center. Suddenly–and pardon the cliche–I was a strong, capable, confident, human body and mind that found herself wholly alive then and there. As soon as my breath connected with the firing of my synapses, my heart became still–if only for a moment–before continuing its steady, infinite beat. The world bloomed in color, red flooded my cheeks, and every nerve in my feet cheered in unison. I ran on, smiling up at the still-waving man on the porch, and we savored a moment together.
Sitting still or running still, the moment is here and now.