Stillness and Idleness

There’s a quiet unease that arises when you watch certain people move through life without pause. They build, explore, learn, create, and continue on, as if stillness were never the point. It can leave you wondering whether they’re avoiding something, or whether they’ve simply understood something most never quite grasp.

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How many people have you known in your life who seem to just keep doing — whether it’s making things, starting and selling businesses, traveling the world endlessly, learning new skills or languages, pursuing perpetual training and all kinds of courses, growing their family, improving their farm, developing or caretaking their land, inventing, or innovating — and you wonder when, or if, they’ll ever sit still and relax for a bit?

It’s clearly the wrong question. In this context, there’s a difference between stillness and idleness. The former is a conscious choice to pause, contemplate, meditate, and perhaps reorient oneself — checking in and recalibrating, if and as necessary, on the journey. The latter leans into laziness, apathy, fatigue, and can inevitably spiral into depression. It’s an oversimplification to say that nature abhors a vacuum, but the principle holds. We are creator beings, and that energy needs its outlets.

It is rare to find those who are being, making, doing, and creating for the sake of fame, fortune, or social status. That may be the case in the early stages, but it often matures into something more intrinsic and fundamental. The ego story eventually steps aside, and truer motivations emerge. Those who are committed to status, power, and notoriety often exhibit sociopathic tendencies. It’s all about them, not about being of service. Anything goes, and anything may be justified in their pursuits. Unfortunately, news media, entertainment, and even academia tend to celebrate, elevate, and immortalize these characters, and we all know a few.

Life here on earth is a story of becoming. It urges us into motion, and the more we resist and find reasons to idle, react, distract, and numb ourselves, the more we risk falling into what is effectively anti-life. Even then, our bodies will do everything within their capacities to keep us here — to give us chance after chance, day after day, to shift learned helplessness, depression, and indecisiveness back into flowing, creative momentum.

This is where goals, aims, aspirations, and visions come into play. Many fall into the trap of a worker-slave mindset, generally learned from those around them who modeled it and struggled to break the pattern that kept them locked in for life. The world around them reinforces the trap, and the welfare state can further encourage complacency and dependency, with promises of pensions and “old age” security — leaving many, in the end, waiting for death and hoping they’ll have the resources to get there. Somehow, this script became “right” for them. That choice became the foundation upon which every other choice was informed and shaped. It wasn’t a goal, but it became the default setting.

This is the crowd that can become prey to the aforementioned sociopaths who operate as parasites. It’s a class of humans that knows only greed, power, and control, utilizing the systems available to them — often devised by them and those who came before — as leverage throughout the realm. They can never have enough because, perhaps ironically, fear and scarcity still inform their lives, regardless of their innumerable riches.

Then there are the artists, whom some may even call heretics — those who delve into what is authentic, real, and true, and are unlikely to consider fading out because they always find ways to stoke their inner fire. They fumble the ball often, stumble, and sometimes fall flat on their faces. They carry an entrepreneurial spirit, even if they maintain a “day job.” They come to see the world as a spectrum of possibilities, regardless of the darkness that may present itself, knowing it is all an offer. Everything is an offer.

They become proficient at placing themselves somewhere within the realm of service to others, knowing that in doing so, they will continue becoming — improving, refining, healing, and adapting. It’s not enough to simply go along to get along, though they may try it on for a time. They are not afraid of losing themselves in transient worldly narratives; they learn from them, integrate what’s useful, find calm, and carry on.

There are infinite variations within these broad structures, and most of us will oscillate between them in one way or another. But the through line is what matters, and we owe it to ourselves to engage in the brutal honesty of self-reflection when we find ourselves leaning into the worker-slave mindset.

We are always becoming, as life is eternally unfolding — unveiling and revealing truths as we are ready to receive and embody them, to test and verify, to refine and purify. In the limited number of minutes you are given in this earthbound sojourn, you get to choose how, where, and why. You are here, now. There is no “if I decide to do it again.” Your awareness, your irrepressible consciousness, provides all the evidence you may ever need. That which is inextinguishable within you urges you to keep becoming, or to suffer the consequences of a kind of living death — stale, stagnant, and immovable.

Your eyes may be well practiced and conditioned to see the world in a limited way, through a tired, distorted lens. Your attention is also a generative power, and it would benefit you, and everyone you care about, to reclaim that agency, that authority, and that authorship. The world stage is highly proficient at pulling us apart, stealing our gaze, and confusing us about the nature of who and what we really are. It will keep us behaving in low-minded, soul-sapping, self-sabotaging ways for as long as we allow it.

If that is the “right” goal for you, no one will judge you. It can only ever be you — because, in the end, it is all for you in the first place.

Solvitur ambulando