Finding Stillness

If you’ve ever had a very good day of writing, a day where you found your story or poem or essay quickly, where you discovered something unexpected and exciting early on and spent the rest of your session pursuing it, because suddenly and quite completely, nothing else seemed as interesting and important – if you’ve ever had a day of writing like this, then you are familiar with the experience of being carried by a momentum for which you are not wholly responsible but of which you are wholly a part. It is as a good feeling as you’ll ever know. You are both entirely free and entirely focused. Gone for the moment are thoughts of your value or mortality; now there is only this very interesting thing and your pursuit of it. It is such a good feeling, and can feel like such a relief, that it is easy to develop a drug-like relationship to it.

I have certainly made that mistake. I became so fixated on the momentum I forgot its source. I believed momentum alone was the answer to the question, “How shall I fill my days?” When I am caught in the momentum of a story I am telling, time disappears; when I am staring down a day with nothing interesting in my sights, time becomes a burden. Give me some momentum, I think. Give me anything – an argument, a game, a movie – anything to get me moving again.

In my desperation to feel better, I forgot that all momentum begins in stillness. It is in stillness that I find the seed of an idea worthy of my full attention. It is in stillness that I find again the balance necessary to move at full speed. It is for this reason that writing remains my greatest practice. To sit quietly in a chair, looking at a blank page, and find that life-giving creative momentum is to be reminded again and again of what is always available for me if I look in the right place.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group coaching.