Last night a friend said something to me that I have not been able to put down. He said, and I am paraphrasing, that he is having trouble finding quiet in his mind. That he feels like he is constantly chasing stillness.
The moment the words left his mouth, something in me stirred. My inner self, the one who has spent a lifetime noticing patterns, whispered back immediately. Isn’t chasing stillness an oxymoron?
You cannot chase what only arrives when you stop running.
But underneath that small internal joke was something far more tender. Because what I recognized in his words was not foreign to me at all. It was familiar. It was mine. Chasing stillness is so often what I have done. As a striver, someone who takes great pride in getting things done, in having a dream and then hunting it down until it becomes real, this is the groove I fall into without even noticing I have fallen. The dream becomes the destination. The stillness becomes another item on the list. And somewhere in the doing, the actual rest I was chasing slips further away, because I am still moving toward it instead of simply being in it.
All summer I have been speaking about a wish. That this would be the summer I have an experience of myself that allows me to put more deposits into my aliveness account. My soul’s savings account.
The part of me that calls for more of me, not more from me. The portal to the most valuable part of who I am, which is not my output but my aliveness. Doing the things that make my heart sing without overdoing them in the name of getting them done. Without needing to prove anything, asking nothing of me but my presence.
And here I sit in mid-August, and for maybe the first time in my life, I can honestly say I have done it.
I let go of a belief I did not even know I was holding so tightly. That every dream has to come true. This summer I discovered that some dreams are not meant to be built. Some are meant only as inspiration, a tease toward something bigger and further down the road, a whisper rather than a blueprint. Letting a dream go without forcing it into existence felt, at first, like failure. It did not take long to feel like a miracle instead. Space opened where striving used to live.
I also became intrigued, and mildly terrified, by the idea of not having plans. Of winging it. If you know me, you know how uncomfortable that sentence is for my nervous system to even write. I am a woman who books things out, who likes to know what is coming, who finds a strange safety in the calendar being full. But this summer I loosened my grip on that too, and what I found on the other side surprised me. There are so many opportunities available to you when you are not fully booked. Miracles cannot get a word in edgewise when every hour already has a plan attached to it.
So when my friend spoke of chasing stillness, I did not correct him. I did not need to. I simply recognized the shape of it, because I have worn it myself for so many years. The striving self believes that if it just works hard enough at rest, rest will finally show up. But rest is not a finish line. It is not something you earn by exhausting yourself in its pursuit. It is a door that opens the moment you stop knocking so hard.
This summer, for maybe the first time, I stopped knocking. I let some dreams stay dreams. I let some days stay empty. And in that emptiness, something in me finally exhaled.
If you are chasing stillness too, I do not have a formula for you. I only have this. The chase itself may be the very thing standing between you and what you are looking for. Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is stop reaching for the horizon and let ourselves be held, right here, by the wave we are already standing in.
With love, from my corner by the sea, Sarah
