The Forgotten Skill of Being Still

It began with a silence I didn’t ask for.

One morning, my phone died without warning. No beeping. No blinking red bar. Just... stillness. My laptop, too, refused to boot. And for reasons beyond logic or technology, the Wi-Fi was down, the power was flickering, and every noise I was used to—the buzzing of apps, the pings of messages, the soft hum of my smart home assistant—was suddenly gone.

For a moment, it felt like a power outage. But it turned out to be something far rarer.

A stillness outage.


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At first, I panicked.
Where were the updates? The notifications? The distractions I wore like armor?

I paced the living room like a restless animal, reaching for screens that didn’t respond. My body fidgeted, trained by years of scrolling and clicking. My thoughts grew loud in the absence of input, racing from old regrets to overdue tasks.

I had no idea how loud the world had become until it suddenly shut up.


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By hour three, I was forced to sit.

Not because I wanted to. But because I had exhausted every possible way to distract myself.

So I sat.

No music. No messages. Just me, the couch, and the sound of wind pressing gently against the windows.

It was uncomfortable. Like meeting a stranger I’d been avoiding for years. That stranger, I realized, was myself.


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Stillness is not the same as doing nothing.

We live in a culture that equates stillness with laziness. If you're not producing, optimizing, multitasking—you're wasting time. But what if that time, the quiet time, is exactly where the soul regenerates?

As I sat there, something strange began to happen.

My breathing slowed. My heartbeat softened. My thoughts, once tangled and sharp, began to unravel and stretch. It was like the static in my mind had been dialed down, and I could finally hear the melody beneath it all.


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I remembered moments I had long buried beneath my digital avalanche:

The way my grandmother used to sit on the porch for hours, saying nothing but smiling at the sky.

The long train rides I took as a child, staring out the window with nothing to do but imagine.

The walks through forests where even my thoughts had learned to whisper.

These weren’t moments of boredom. They were moments of connection—with the world, with myself, with the rhythm of life.

Somewhere along the way, I had forgotten how to be still.


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The next day, I didn’t turn my phone back on right away. I could’ve. Everything worked again—Wi-Fi, electricity, social media. The storm had passed, both outside and in.

But I chose to keep the silence a little longer.

I went outside.

There was a park down the street I hadn’t visited in over a year. I sat on a bench and simply watched—children playing, leaves trembling in the breeze, a couple walking hand in hand, laughing over something unshared.

No headphones. No podcasts. Just presence.

And that’s when it clicked.

Stillness isn’t just about pausing. It’s about paying attention.


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We often ask where peace has gone in this world, but maybe the real question is: when did we stop making space for it?

You see, peace doesn’t shout. It doesn’t push itself into your schedule or demand a like or a retweet. Peace is polite. It waits in quiet corners, behind unhurried breaths, in long walks with no destination.

Stillness is how peace introduces itself.


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Since that strange, silent morning, I’ve made stillness a ritual.

Ten minutes a day. Sometimes more. No devices. No stimulation. Just breath. Just being. Just noticing.

It’s not always comfortable. The mind resists. But I’ve learned to greet the discomfort with curiosity instead of avoidance.

And what I’ve found—beneath the noise, the hustle, the digital frenzy—is something I didn’t know I had lost:

My center.


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We talk about self-care like it’s something you can buy, download, or schedule. But the most powerful act of care you can offer yourself is presence.

In stillness, we remember that we are not machines meant to produce.
We are human beings—meant to feel, to breathe, to witness.

And in those moments of deep stillness, I’ve heard something even more profound than a thousand notifications:

My own voice.

Clear. Calm. True.


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