When was the last time you sat in stillness?
Just because?
And I’m not talking about sitting in meditation. I mean intentionally just letting a moment, an hour, or a day unfold, and being alone with your thoughts?
I once took a vacation to Colorado and spent most of it going with the flow. Not making a plan, taking each day as it came.
As a result, I had a lot of time to myself, and with myself. Because I hadn’t been scheduled to the nth degree or ferociously attacking a to-do list, it created space for thoughts to land in my brain and stay there.
And in that space, there is wisdom to be had. Ideas germinated and took shape. Answers I had been seeking suddenly made themselves known. Maybe most importantly, I saw things from a different perspective.
It’s old and cliché this whole ‘see a new perspective’ thing. And it works! When we open up the aperture to see beyond what’s in front of us, it creates wiggle room for evolution and change.
Mountain view from the Colorado Rockies.
The mountains offer a great analogy (metaphor?) for this.
If you take a picture of the mountains, you’ll only see the part of the range that fits into the viewfinder. But the range is way more expansive than what you see on your phone.
We need to create a habit to allow ourselves to connect with what’s beyond the viewfinder.
Most of us are wired for action. Get shit done. And the environments we’re working in reward us for it. So we just dial up the intensity, keep the camera zoomed in close and never see the rest of the view.
The answers you’re looking for might be outside the frame. The only way to find them is to put the camera down and be still long enough to look.
Your call to action is to find a few moments of stillness and see what emerges.
