Five Minute Friday: Still

Welcome to another week of Five Minute Friday — an online community where bloggers who mostly don’t even dare to call themselves writers put their brave on week after week and bring the internet alive with their beautiful words.

It’s a place where we write free and deep and wide, where we let it all spill onto the screen in all its messy, jumbled up glory. It’s a place to link arms with others, to lift them up, to shine a light, to give hope.

Ready?  GO.

Still.  There was a time when I couldn't do it, couldn't find the peace and inner quiet to just let myself be still.  There was so much inner agitation, so much that would appear unbidden in the stillness, so I got busy.  I made my body busy.  I made my mind busy.  I made my life busy.  Surprisingly, it was the arrival of children that broke through the busy.  It was the decision to stay home with the beautiful baby that brought me face to face with stillness.  And it was hard, those early years.  I didn't want to be alone with my thoughts, yet what was there to distract me with this newborn who slept and ate all the time, never giving me anything to fill the stillness?

We have a practice now called Quiet Time.  I crave it each day.  I get through my busy mornings with the promise of a chance to sit, to be still, to think or write or read or lay down.  The children like it too, although the youngest claims to hate it.  He is like I once was, afraid to be still.  In his case, he is afraid of the sleep that will overtake him, afraid he will miss all the fun we are possibly having while he naps.

So what made the difference in the middle?  When did I change from a girl desperately running away from the quiet to one who presides over stillness in a house full of active, loud boys?  It took time, certainly, as nothing in my life has come about overnight.  It took writing, this act of sitting down and putting it down, bringing forth the ugliness and the parts I'd like to forget and pulling them from the dark recesses of my heart and giving them a home outside of my body.  I used to be so anxious, so impatient, and over the years I have come to delight in a few moments of delay, a postponed event.  It gives me time to be still.

STOP.