“When you are able to create a lonely place in the middle of your
actions and concerns, your successes and failures slowly
can lose some of their power over you.”
– Henri J.M. Nouwen
The Subtle Art of Stillness
I’ve been reading John C. Maxwell’s The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth and two chapters in, I’ve already noticed a major thing that has hindered my own growth. STILLNESS – or lack thereof.
Stillness is an interesting word to me. The art of being still. With so much opportunity for love, money, or “fun”, to be still seemingly equals death. To do nothing truly is an art. It forces you to sit with yourself and learn yourself, face all your shortcomings and make a choice – to deal with them or ignore them. Face all those compounding thoughts that have accumulated in the dark of your mind over the past 20, 30, 40, etc. years before you’ve read this statement. Imagine what your clothes would be like if you didn’t wash them for that long of a time or if you kept your car constantly running for hours on end with absolutely no idle time. My takeaway is that stillness is like cleansing your mind and recharging your spirit and physical body.
We treat our minds and bodies like machines but hell, even machines have downtime or else they’d malfunction. So, for us,, stillness is a must. It’s that necessary factor that in the moment/minutes/hours that we do nothing, our minds can catch up with all the information we’ve consciously and unconsciously loaded it with. That’s right, unconsciously. Now, I’m no neuroscientist, but I do know that there’s at least two sides of our minds, the conscious and unconscious, and I think this is because our brain would overload if all of our activities in our years of existence would remain in our consciousness. Imagine that EVERY single thought and action you’ve done up until this point, you were conscious of and there was no “backup storage space” to log that information. That’s how I’ve come to equate subconsciousness to being. It’s the activities that our body just does, from the habits we’ve formed over the years so that our brain doesn’t have to focus on those things, but can use that now vacant space to create and expand.
In the days that we do “nothing”, our consciousness and subconsciousness get together and talk, maybe teach other things. Our stillness is our individual accountability partner. So protect it and embrace it fully. Consistently. Lovingly. Because without that, we’re just a moment away from complete malfunction.
So, in your stillness, try to sit through these 3 stages – Investigation, Incubation, and Illumination. John Maxwell does an amazing job of explaining these stages and how to navigate them, so I definitely recommend you check out his Book, 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth.
Anyways, Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a blessed and introspective day. Let’s keep growing!!
– Jamal Henderson