Stillness Debt

I almost never go to sleep without some sort of auditory distraction. In my college days it was worse, often going to sleep with my laptop open on my chest, blasting blue-light and Netflix into my eyes which I somehow found more appealing than lying there in the dark with nothing but my own thoughts. These days it’s a bit better, usually some calming audiobook or podcast.

Why the aversion to silence? What is it I’m so scared to think about? Nothing that not I’m equally capable of worrying about during the daytime, that's for sure. At this point it’s simply a habit I’ve formed. I would hesitate to use the word addiction, but the one thing that all addictions have in common, and that I’m guilty of here, is that they’re a means of running away from stillness.

Stillness (aka boredom) is a critical part of every human psyche. It’s how we process our lives and re-calibrate ourselves, it’s how we make ourselves available to the great unknowable wisdom that lives beyond our intellect. Insight never arrives if we’re never still for long enough for it to catch up. What’s more, the painful memories, the things that we avoid thinking about because touching them is like touching a bruise, they need stillness in order to heal. Nothing is ever healed while running around listening to podcasts and watching TV.

I believe the longer we run away from stillness, the more a kind of pressure builds up in our psyche, like a mounting debt. The greater the debt, the more desperately we tend to want to avoid it. The irony of course is that the only way to pay off the debt is by giving it our attention. By facing the stillness and the boredom and whatever weird, painful or enlightening thoughts emerge.

If you're lucky you have no idea what I'm talking about. But maybe you do. Maybe there’s something you need to allow yourself to feel deeply. Maybe there’s something you need to cry about. Maybe you have an inner bully that likes to say hurtful, terrible things. Maybe you just need enough space to realize how much you fucking hate your job. (Been there!) Whatever it is, let it play itself out. All feedback is valuable, even the inaccurate stuff. Eventually we can pay off the stillness debt. And once the debt is paid, and the loud, obnoxious, repetitive voices in our head die down, then we can hear the bible refers to as the still, small voice. The one that wants the best for us. Some call it intuition. Others call it God. I call it the voice worth listening to.