Daily Life: The Stillness of Others

We live our lives in almost constant motion - if we are not physically moving we are often mentally moving. It is a swirling complexity interwoven with complications.

It is such a constant current that we are often unaware of it. It remains an invisible force in our life unless we are fortunate to have the time to stop and observe and develop that awareness. Yet, in stillness, resides a quiet and essential part of us. We can move through other people's lives and they move through ours over the course of years of time and layers of intimacy and never glimpse that part of them that resides in stillness.

There are depths in people that you can never know unless you know them in the stillness of their lives as well as the actions of their lives. There are depths inside of us that we can never know unless we find that precious time to know ourselves in stillness.

At the core of quantum physics is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which says, more or less, "that certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known."(Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle)

When it comes to bodies at rest and motion we can know them well in either stillness or motion and their very nature may be significantly different in either state. It can be very difficult to share stillness because something as simple as the presence of another person can alter us in very subtle ways - it can pull us from our inner stillness and put us in motion, if only mentally, due to our awareness of the other person.

We can sometimes get a glimpse of that stillness when we observe a person and they do not know that we are observing them. When we watch their small actions, not their larger actions, when we watch the little things that comprise the most of us, those small things that move just at the threshold of our interactive awareness, we can then see glimpses of that stillness.

The examples that popped into my mind were - the subtle ways a person treats a pet, the small interactions with a child, their expressions as they read or sleep or eat. The twinkle in the eye at the taste of chocolate or the contented sigh at that first morning cup of coffee or the lazy tracing of fingers on fabric. The things that make them spontaneously smile or frown as they go through them. The dignity and grace they exhibit while folding laundry or the Zen of washing dishes or the sublime grace of solitary prayer.

None of these of course are stillness - stillness, true stillness, simply cannot be observed. In Zen they say the moment you are aware of your awareness you are not aware. That applies to stillness as well - the moment you are aware of your stillness you are no longer still. But there is moment just before the process of being aware kicks in when we are not aware but we know and in that moment we can know our own stillness and the stillness of others. It is an astounding moment. It is in that moment that we can truly know another being. Of course, being human, we will then promptly clutter it up with the complications and the complexities of life and that is perfectly fine. That may be what being human is about.