Things are changing a bit; quite a bit. The daily race pace is slowing. Stopping one morning after completing some ordinary task, like taking out the garbage, I sat. A sense of settling was happening while sitting in a chair by the cellar door in this quiet old home. It was calm and quiet. The floor, walls, windows, ceiling, and doors all appear comfortably familiar. There’s a resting. Without any notice or signal the shoulders relax. The entire body soothes a fluid sensation at rest. Novel comfort. No motion. No need. The air becomes sense-able. The air is touching me with an amiable pressure. I can feel it. It is still. There is a stillness. I get the sense that the stillness is intentional. Everything is at rest in it. I arrived in a place I did not know existed. I’ve heard about the still point. I understand it to be a fundamental feature and fixture of reality. Everything feels whole, complete. Is this an immovable something in which things are grounded? It has me. The sense of okay ness sky rockets. Nothing is out of place. Random sounds break the silence, but nothing disturbs it. Could this is be the transcendental extension of the Eternal; the stillness of the still? There’s no reason to move at this point. A type of involuntary meditation carried the moment. Without losing coherence or context of the verities of my own existence, facts of life didn’t seem right, wrong, unnecessary, in, or out of place. What I would now refer to as a relationship with awareness of is and isn’t comes on. Without disturbance my now comfortable body stands. The intentional standing and subsequent motion is involved with, and in, a stillness field of capacities that make me wonder. The return is awesome in that there doesn’t appear to be resistance inside me to getting right with what is.
Reconciliation of confusion and chaos can be challenging. Discerning what is the next thing to do and/or say can be confounding. Knowing/caring whether or not something is helpful or hurtful is often an unconscious guess. Guarding my own self interest without considering a balance with the greater good is a difficult attitude to escape. There’s an unconsciousness component about life and living that may very well have a life of its own. Some unconscious mindless reactions to existential stimuli that are based on programming, both genetic and installed, that has never been critically evaluated. How does one begin to account for that? How often it seems like a very common response to fixing, gaining, achieving anything is too hurry up. “We’ve got to get to this right away.” Hence an accelerating pace of reaction time, internet speed, gratification, response, answers, and the subsequent activity to bring get results. Heaven forbid that the results are not satisfactory. Now this situation needs to be straightened out even quicker. A manifestation of this may be the oft surprisingly long Amazon return line down at the local Staples. How long before I’m failing on a George Jetson high speed dog walking treadmill that sucks me under, and reduces me to chasing my one tail as fast as possible with no relief in sight? The metaphor for the modern age might as well be Ritalin. The only stillness in this equation may very well be a full stop at the end of a dead end.
“The faster we go, the rounder we get.” – That’s it for the Other One, Grateful Dead. How spun out would I like to get? It has never been a primary objective of trying to keep up with the rat race, and with that said it still gets mad hectic. With a novel calling for calm, I think I’ve heard the no call calling from stillness. With a motionless move towards a rumored eternal ground, everything freezes. Gong… Slow down. You’ll get there faster.
There? Where? I wonder…