When was the last time you sat in complete silence?
No music playing in the background. No podcast filling the space. No television murmuring from the other room. Just absolute stillness.
For most of us, true silence is rare.
We have become so accustomed to background noise that its absence feels deeply uncomfortable.
I noticed this in myself recently. If I had to wait in line for more than ten seconds, my hand automatically reached for my phone. If I went for a walk, I needed headphones. If I was cooking dinner, I needed a video playing.
I was terrified of being bored.
But more than that, I think I was terrified of what thoughts might surface if I gave my brain a moment of quiet.
So I started an experiment: ten minutes of stillness every morning.
No phone. No music. No journaling. Just sitting on the balcony with a cup of coffee and watching the neighborhood wake up.
The first few days were agonizing. My brain felt like a browser with fifty tabs open, all desperately trying to reload at once.
But by the end of the second week, something shifted. The noise in my head began to settle. The frantic urge to "do something" was replaced by a strange sense of calm.
I'm still learning how to be comfortable with stillness, but I'm realizing that it's in these quiet moments that we actually discover who we are when the rest of the world isn't watching.
