After a few weeks of solitude – learning it, exploring it, feeling out the boundaries – one (of the many) thing I've found developing is an even deeper understanding for the value of stillness. It's also one of those few things which doesn't require such volumes of context to communicate well, or which perhaps even should be shared.
Stillness gives value to motion. Perhaps this is self-evident, but as I find myself stepping out of solitude and plunged into the clamour of the world, or even as it swirls around me as I sit back from it, I am increasingly astonished (and dismayed) by the meaninglessness of it.
It hurts. It hurts terribly.
My growing desire for an active less, in the last some years, has been largely instinctive. I couldn't explain much apart from the increasingly apparent unattractiveness of busyness and noise and clutter. In the last few weeks, it resolved itself into one of those integrated, simple truths:
Without stillness, motion has no meaning.
Without silence, speech has no meaning.
Without solitude, intimacy has no meaning.
Only the ability to choose to not do something makes the doing a choice. Otherwise, it's just a compulsion.
"My growing desire for an active less, in the last some years"
ReplyDeleteI didn't understand this bit, and I couldn't work out an intuitive typo. American slang perhaps?
No, just the words that fit the sense of it. Wanting less; active as opposed to passive; does "last some years" need translation?
ReplyDeleteNo, I think it's the "for an active less" that I don't get. It seems like it needs another word, like, "for an active life less"?
ReplyDeleteI'm okay with it being outside strict literal prose. :)
ReplyDelete