Question: how much time do you invest per day into being quiet?
“Quiet” here is defined as being still. No input. No TV. No messaging. No social media. No reading, watching, or listening to anything. Not even journaling or talking. Just you. Sitting still, by yourself, allowing you to hear and listen to your thoughts, feel your emotions, and sense your physical state of being.
This “quiet” is necessary for full awareness of yourself, to know how you are really doing and where you feel you are at in this moment and in life.
If I had to answer that question, I don’t invest enough. There are moments in my life though where I can feel the overwhelm and exhaustion, and so I realize it’s time to stop moving and doing and instead just experience everything going on in my life. To sit with the stress, the fears, the tiredness, the frustrations, the concerns, and to just sit with it.
But you might also sit with the realization that you are content, happy actually, and that you like where you are at in life, what you are doing with your life, and who you believe yourself to be in that moment. You might realize there’s nothing wrong
The return on investment towards quiet can be disproportionately rewarding.
The quiet can help calm the negativity. It can help you center. It can be reprieve and restorative. Quiet, rest, should be recovery. It gives, not takes. It requires nothing but letting go and simply being.
It’s free, always accessible, and has almost no risk.
If you find yourself at your limit, you might realize that you don’t need to do more and to pause. Because what you might realize during and then after the quiet is that you don’t need to do more, but now you can.
