On Stillness.

The air was simple and pulsing, so much so that it wasn’t. Not really. It may have just been my mind—prone to seeing commotion in all things, easily identifying chaos at the brim of every step—tricking me into believing air could have a heartbeat. That it could take up a life in showing people what it means to move with intent and with none at all.

When the doctor told me I was a good boy, that I was going to grow up to become a man—a good man—I didn’t always believe him. I’m not sure when it was that I started narrowing my eyes whenever someone said good things about me. In each of these moments, I stutter into ‘Thank You’ and change the subject so as to never internalize someone else’s perspective of me. What I never knew is how the stillness afterwards would rattle me into second-guessing all good things, not just the words spoken in my direction.

It was always this stillness that I never intimately knew; I hadn’t considered letting myself be in the company of me and only me, no screens or glowing devices, no other humans, nothing to distract me from myself. Through the lens of a broken heart, the whole world is cold. Bitter, even. And full of despair. It’s through this lens that I’ve always found words from within that have brought a certain kind of solace. I’ve always believed that I could muster enough courage to be myself during the brokenness of my body. Just never around others. Not yet. Not until I could find a home inside of myself.

At the local coffeeshop, a man next to me takes his headphones out, leans over, and tells me not to think too much. Says that there are things that he wished he didn’t know, says that there are brief moments when he glosses over these things and then the monsters create themselves out of thin air. There’s a stillness in this man’s voice that doesn’t shake or tremble, doesn’t quiver when his truth pours out; he has spent many even months behind self-made bars hoping someone will stop long enough to see him again in this life. I think of what this means; how any of us create the quiet we seek or if the quiet itself seeks us, or perhaps how it can be true that mourning/morning sits with us unlike anything else.

The moment we arrive in stillness, everything ceases. Pico Iyer talked about this in interviews. How he sought a few days spent in a Catholic hermitage. How he drove on narrow roads up a mountain, bending and weaving, no rails to keep him from toppling over. How he fought with himself endlessly on those winding pavements—the guilt of leaving his mother behind, of leaving his work behind, of not being able to be reached as he sought the reaching of himself. But when he arrived, the stillness of it all reminded him that taking these three days would allow him to be a better son, a better worker, a better friend, a better him. Just by showing up in stillness, in kindness, in contemplation, he could resolve to disconnect with everyone and everything in order to make better connections.

This arrival, with all of its nuances and complexities, is made simple. As Iyer would say, it washes us clean—takes us out of our bodies for a moment, wrings us of our excess, and puts us back again. This is what it means to be still. It creates models with which our world can be deconstructed, emptied, and refilled in a way that is new and exciting and genuine.

Here I am saying a lot and not saying much at the same time. Here I am, a man made from all of my father’s mistakes, wound just right to believe that there is something in the sky beckoning us home when the streetlights come on. My mother’s voice—a song I both once knew and am still in the midst of knowing—clears fog on the lost sidewalk, the Devil strip I find myself wading against, walking along. I’m side-stepping into an infinity I do not yet know. There is no home inside every man who cannot recognize the hurt they harbor. We are not built to be society’s definition of strong, whatever that may be; there are edges we haven’t yet explored enough to know their stretch marks, the depth with which they’ve rooted into our grounds.

We forget what weaving means, how the bottom breath of this life exists regardless of the top, and perhaps in spite of it. Good to have a poem you wrote in the basement see the light of day; worn on a friend’s face over coffee black, I am enamored with the fascination this moment carries with it, soon to be gone but never forgotten. We are all this poem in a way. Good to be alone with itself. Good to be a safe zone for crash landings. Good to show up when least expected to. Good to clamor against machinery that builds defenses around hearts.

Here I am saying that you do not have to believe. You do not have to wade in the water that is not flowing through you. Here I am saying every essay is a poem in disguise just learning how to exist on a page long enough to survive the cuts, the bruises, the bent breath we carry for it.

Everything can be an example of celebration if we learn to let enough light in. I stand staring at the edges of my soft palms praising all that is good and somewhat holy about the way we get to exist in this life together. There’s a hum steadily climbing in the background; a familiar white noise I’ve never heard, a house built of stacked bricks but not cement perishing lightly all at once.

There can exist a world where, in every room you enter, you are surrounded by all that you love and all that loves you back without fear of exiting. You do not have to be a warning sign for destruction in every heartbroken moment. You can exist and be loved and that can be enough. We all can be enough.