The Myth Of Momentum.

Why stillness is the foundation of all movement.

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To watch the window as if it’s TV requires a willingness to bathe in silence. Not always easy, save for the graininess that livens the slowing-moving truth in the form of rain. When it rains, it’s okay. It becomes easier to watch, like a wide-eyed kid, the world in alien colour. 'Winter is coming’, the rain seems to whisper, its thickened drops plopping like lukewarm snow onto withered leaves. 

There was a time when I held the silence close like a dear friend. Like a friend that I knew was stronger than me, bigger than me, that I allowed to teach me the ways of the world. A mute big brother, he guided in the subtlest way. But when I became annoyed with him and wanted nothing more but to wrestle, argue, shout and strike, he simply retreated back and said nothing at all. I imagined myself victorious after one witty word stifled him into oblivion. For aeons, I forgot all about this brother. Each moment distracted by sound was better than facing the void. Meditation, a dance with this terrifying nothingness, became a detour to futility.

Why sit still if I could move? 

Even in my silliness, the silence said nothing. It would remind me of its presence in more lugubrious ways, slithering its way to me in the dead of night, deafening in its emptiness. I would lay there, silence ringing in my ear, and I would try to fight it. Like a friend uncomfortable with sharing a moment of silence with another, so much can be squandered by trying to fill what does not need to be filled.

I think we hate to face the silence, the same way we hate to look into the mirror after we’ve done something we shouldn’t have. It’s revealing in its entirety. Beneath the push that gets us to be in stillness— is an undefined idea that we should have started years ago. Or that, instead, it’s not the right time, that we must keep trudging like delirious soldiers through muddied eternity until clarity appears like golden light through the clouds. 

An acquaintance of mine, extroverted at first glance, lives his life in a state of stimulated distraction. During moments of existential conversation, he often finds reasons to escape the room, change the topic or simply infuse laughter through the group so as to stifle the seriousness of discussion. When called out on his somewhat peculiar predisposition, he admits to ‘being terrified,’ he says, of his bedroom ceiling swallowing him up whole. He fears that once he lets totality in, there’d be no way of plunging the hole, that somehow, somewhere in that mess, he would get lost. I feel bad for a guy like that. At breakfast, he listens to a podcast whilst watching TV, checking his crypto between bites of cinnamon crunch cereal and half-beat, distracted conversation with his housemate. He does everything he can not to meet himself.

There’s this sense of having to ‘hold ourselves together,’ that silence obliterates the way a bowling ball sends its pins flying. As if facing shapelessness flattens the form we’ve fought so hard to gather. We hold ourselves together like string puppets with plans for the future, with grudges from the past, with anything that’ll coax us into accelerated movement because momentum is what’s useful, not stillness. It seems that relenting to silence threatens the speed we’ve built after weeks, months, years of pushing.

What if that’s an illusion?

Momentum requires a gargantuan thrust to what feels like an immovable boulder. As the first shift occurs, the rock begins to crane like a drooping mountain. Once it’s gone, it’s no effort; it falls like it has a life of its own, we need not even touch it— the world pushes it for us. Stillness requires the complete opposite effort. It’s a surrender to totality; it requires a willingness to detach ourselves from enamoured progress and allow ourselves to fizzle out the way Sprite becomes water when it’s poured into the ocean. It’s not trying. It’s letting the world wash over us.

What if silence isn’t stagnant but patient? What if it gathers, waits, and becomes bulbous with potential energy? Like the tightening of the bowstring before the arrow flies, it channels every possibility into a singular point of focus. That focus is the aperture of your mind. To sit with silence, then, is to align with the rhythm of everything. To trust that the quiet knows what it’s doing is to know that stillness is the foundation of all movement. When we stop fearing silence, we find it isn’t empty at all— it’s alive! brimming with the weight of untold possibility. Not an enemy to conquer, nor a teacher to outwit—just a quiet brother, patient and loyal, ready to walk us home.

-IL.

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Thank you for reading, and to the new subscribers who recently joined— welcome! This piece was a joy to write, one that has been percolating in my mind for some time. Within my work as a film director I place a lot of importance on movement, both in camera and as a rhythmic tool in editing. Once you go too far in one direction, its direct opposite will also be revealed, and hence I have made it an intention to spend a lot more time in stillness. If there’s anything I’d tell my younger self who was so eager to move, move, move— it would be to return to stillness, often. Till next time,

—IL.