The Rebellion of Stillness

August 2020 

There are days when the silence seems more honest than any explanation. A man can live his whole life chasing the sound of things, engines, applause, voices that promise meaning. But there’s something suspect in all that movement. The way it hurries. The way it distracts. Somewhere along the line, we confused motion with purpose and forgot how to sit still without falling apart.

Stillness isn’t fashionable. It isn’t taught. It doesn’t lend itself to slogans or seminars. It doesn’t reassure. But there it is, quiet as a tree, unbending even in surrender. A kind of resistance without banners. A refusal not born of ideology but of exhaustion, of knowing too much to argue.

It’s not easy, this way of living. There’s no medal for walking away from the noise. No comfort in watching the scaffolding of identity fall to the ground. What you were taught to be, son, husband, professional, citizen, was always a kind of performance, and it’s tiring, isn’t it? Keeping up the role. Making the gestures. Smiling when you want to scream or simply disappear.

People don’t talk much about that, the quiet panic under the surface of identity. The feeling that if you stop pretending, everything will fall apart. And maybe it will. But maybe that’s what needs to happen.

Because what’s left after the collapse might be the first honest thing you’ve known. Not a revelation, not a new self, just the absence of pretence. A clearing, nothing more. But in that clearing, something breathes. It doesn’t wear robes or speak in riddles. It has no use for enlightenment. It just is.

And that’s where sincerity begins. Not the performative kind, dressed up for approval, but something raw and unyielding. A refusal to lie, even when the truth is inconvenient or ugly. You stop trying to impress anyone, yourself most of all. You speak less, but what you say has weight. You begin to see the world not as a stage, but as a place to be endured honestly.

It’s a lonely path, mostly. You’ll miss the warm shelter of belonging, the flattery of recognition. There are no signposts, no doctrine, no clever phrases to lean on. Just the dull ache of honesty, and the odd, unshakable sense that for the first time, you’re not pretending.

There’s no promise at the end of it. No prize. Just a kind of tired peace. A silence that holds rather than demands. And the knowledge, perhaps, that you’ve stopped chasing ghosts.

You won’t be able to explain it to anyone. Not really. But then again, maybe you won’t need to. Some truths are too simple for language. They only ask to be lived.

And so you walk, not forward or back, but inward, away from the stage, into the silence. Not to escape, but to return. Not to become someone else, but to finally stop trying to be anyone at all.