The Noise That Never Ends
The day begins not with birdsong but with breaking news, the kind that pounds on the soul like a drum you never asked to hear. Before I’ve taken a sip of coffee, my phone is buzzing. The headlines cascade like falling debris from a collapsing building—wars breaking out, storms breaking records, politicians shouting louder than the truth they bury.
The other morning, I read that one of our courts issued yet another ruling so convoluted it left scholars debating its meaning more than its consequence. And while experts parsed commas and precedents, people’s lives trembled on the line. Ambiguity itself had become a weapon.
It struck me as the emblem of our age: confusion packaged as authority, chaos wearing a suit and tie. In moments like that, I can feel myself shrinking. My heart rate ticks up, my mind starts racing. It’s as if the world is whispering, you must respond, you must keep up, you must not fall behind.
But here’s what I’ve learned—sometimes the most courageous act is to stop. To refuse the treadmill. To plant myself in stillness even while the world insists that movement is survival.
A Still Place Inside
When I was younger, I used to think peace was something you earned once life slowed down. That peace was a kind of prize, given after the chaos had been conquered. But life kept teaching me otherwise. Peace never arrives as a gift from the world. It emerges as a discovery within it.
There’s a still point inside us, deeper than panic, deeper than urgency. You can feel it if you pay close attention. It’s not the absence of movement—it’s the center of it. The calm eye inside the storm.
Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, “The only journey is the one within.” (Letters to a Young Poet).
And Rabindranath Tagore had his own companion truth paraphrased it went something like this: The silence of the night brings us nearer to the eternal.
Together, they remind me that stillness isn’t retreat from the world, but the way to stand firmly in it.
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