Searching for Stillness

with a little nudge from a Calico Critter in a car & Brené Brown

Last week I was mindlessly watching Instagram stories when this scrolled by:

From @fransquishco, with thanks to @shelbynewsome for reposting!

I held my finger on the screen and read the words several times: like the last two years haven’t changed me irreparably.

Changed. Me. Irreparably.

Earlier that same day I had seen Brené Brown’s announcement that she will be going dark on social media for three months. She is taking a sabbatical and everyone on her team will take summer Fridays off, as well as four weeks of paid vacation. She starts the article with this well known quote:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” —Viktor Frankl*

She goes on to explain how the quote has always been a touchstone for her and how she’s noticed a shift in her ability to pause recently:

The past couple of years have been hard—personally and professionally—and I’ve found that space closing in on itself again. My responses have started sliding too close to the stimuli. I’m tired, and the pause is suffering. I can’t let that happen to me or to our organization. We need breath and space. (link to full article: Creating Space)

Again, I paused and re-read this several times: we need breath and space.

Breath. And. Space.

Sometimes the messages we need to hear come from succinct, beautifully written posts and other times they appear in memes featuring Calico Critters in plastic cars (to be clear, I’m here for both). Recently, I’d been feeling something I couldn’t quite put words to. Like something had shifted or changed just a bit, and not for the better.

One silver lining from early pandemic times for me was the forced slower pace. I was privileged to have work that could be done remotely, and my office responded quickly to full work-from-home in those early days. Mornings without a commute felt more spacious. In the evening it was easy to linger over prepping, cooking, and eating meals when there wasn’t much else going on. It seemed like collectively we all gave each other grace for being just a little slow in our responses because this was all so new and uncertain.

In recent months, as I started to see signs of the world opening back up more and more, I thought about how I want to hang on to some of this spaciousness. To stay more still. For there to be less hustle to it all. And yet slowly, imperceptibly almost, that space started to evaporate.

That’s what I was feeling that I couldn’t quite pin down— the absence of breath and space and quiet stillness.

I finally figured it out when I saw it reflected back in that meme and Brené Brown’s post. And I realized that I thought about wanting these things, but I didn’t take the next step of developing any real, concrete ways to actually hold on to them. So, of course I’m feeling like I’m back to business as usual (which honestly wasn’t working great pre-pandemic). The if you don’t change anything, nothing changes lesson is one it seems I will need to be stubbornly reminded of again and again.

Armed with this (not so) new insight that I actually need to be intentional about the changes I want to create, I’ve come up with a few things that I hope will help bring some stillness back into my life:

• Putting meditation first: I’ve had a mediation practice for a long time and I generally practice in the morning. However, the specific time of the morning has never really been set. It’s sort of after breakfast, after doing some writing or promotional work for Healthier Hustle, but before running or yoga, before getting ready for work. Some days I look at the clock and realize that the breakfast/writing/promotion time had slipped super close to the time I need to get ready to start my workday. I’ll just find a 5 minute meditation to squeeze in had started to become more the norm than the exception. While I will vehemently tell anyone that a little goes a long way and that if you only have five minutes for meditation give it those five minutes— the problem in my case wasn’t that I didn’t have more than five minutes, it was that I wasn’t being intentional with my time. Armed with the realization that I am craving more quietness, it became obvious that I could prioritize starting my day in stillness, by meditating before I do all the other things.

• Going to bed: I get the most out of my mornings when I get up around 5:15am - 5:30am. It gives me ample spaciousness for all the things I listed above. To accomplish this I need to be in bed with the lights out by 10:00pm. For a number of reasons I’d been letting my bedtime push later and later (evening work events leading to late dinners, too much mindless scrolling, just one more episode of something on Netflix). As the semester winds down into summer at work, it’s a good time for a reset. Here’s to being in bed with a good book by 9:30pm!

• Stopping the scroll: Yeah. This one. This is the BIG one on my list, honestly. The amount of space that I’ve been allowing mindless use of social media to take up is rather remarkable. It too often sucks up the time I meant to be using for creative projects in the morning. A quick break to see what’s on Instagram after work slides well into when I meant to be preparing dinner. I’m considering a few things to combat this: first and foremost I’m putting back in place the no social media before noon guardrail that I allowed myself to crash through. I’ll make an exception for posting on LinkedIn but will set specific days to do that in the morning, versus after lunch. I left Twitter and Facebook years ago and am giving some serious consideration to letting go of Instagram too. At a minimum I may take a break if I can’t be more mindful about the time I’m giving it. This one is a work in progress, but one thing I am one hundred percent certain of is that scrolling is the complete and total opposite of stillness.

And so that’s where I am right now. Thanks to a Calico Critter in a car and Brené Brown I’ve identified the root of that low hum of discontent I’ve been feeling. I’ve come up with a plan to put back some of the spaciousness I crave. Will I stick to it everyday?Likely not. But like mediation, it will be a practice. Every day will be a chance to begin again.

To find my pause and reset.

---

Things of Beauty

Just a few things that felt particularly soul-nourishing recently (or maybe just made me smile).

• This recent post from Sara Parker, which is also about stillness. Always so reaffirming to know others are feeling pulled to the same things in different ways. (Go for the stillness post and stay for Sara’s other awesome writing— like this deep dive into water and this take on a ham sandwich).

• One of my students hosted an awesome event about Iranian culture as a final project for one of her classes. I love the website she created to accompany the in-person experience. After sampling the food at her event, I can’t wait to dive into some of the recipes in the Seer|Garlic section. A great reason to scroll less and cook more!

• Perhaps when I feel like picking up my phone to mindlessly look at Instagram I’ll just watch this otter live cam for a few minutes. 🦦

• I couldn’t get the line “in the quiet, in the crowd” from this song out of my head while writing this post. Obviously it’s not about the sort of quiet and stillness I’m talking about— but the longing embodied in it seems to fit how I’ve been feeling:

---

How are you? Do you find yourself craving space and stillness or are things too quiet?Have you figured out how to both be present on social media and reclaim your time from the scroll? Are otters cuter than squirrels? (Obviously not, but a close second perhaps.) Leave a comment and let me know.

*Postscript: Great explainer at the end of Brené Brown’s Creating Space article about how the origin of this quote is actually a bit of a mystery. I never knew!