The greatest act of consciousness is to be still, and the greatest act of courage is to stay still, if only for a few moments. It at first takes a great effort, will, to get there.

Some say they find peace in such things, a calm, a serenity. They do not talk about clawing against the sides of your own consciousness, about the echoes of distraction clamoring. They do not speak of these things because no one wants these things, everyone wants to hide away from the world sometimes… only to find themselves with their self.  Yoga is trendy, as meditation once was, but this is not either one of those things.

In periods of great concentration, things fall away to the pinpoint of what matters, the goals, the challenges, and this is where most people live, what most people aspire to – the goal oriented world neglecting the context, incapable of understanding things as they are, only seeing things as hindrances or helps in the world toward whatever it is that they’re working for. They are all short term goals, anyway, in geological terms.

The bread you remember or forget at the store won’t matter in a thousand years. The meal you had that you took a picture of won’t matter in 10,000 years. That perfect sentence you wrote and are so proud of won’t matter in 100,000 years. It all comes down to the now, the repercussions, the causalities, the probabilities, and the flawed understanding of the world that we have been taught or have learned in less than a heartbeat of the Universe.

The silence is eery. Some run from it, afraid of what they might find, thinking it the deepest part of themselves when in fact it’s only where we start. Some stare into it, mesmerized, unable to do anything else. And others dive in and come back out, changed every time in ways others cannot understand, in ways sometimes they themselves cannot understand.

There is something there in that mess of neurons and cells that holds secrets we do not explore enough. A period of time where we see everything at once when we stare at nothing, a period of time when the future and the past mean nothing. It’s not even a goal, it’s a way of being.

A way of being different for everyone.