Stillness Is Not Elsewhere

The mind is quick to place peace somewhere else.

A sound enters the room, and quiet seems to fall behind it. A thought appears, and stillness is imagined underneath it. A conversation begins, and the heart leans toward the moment after, when it hopes to return.

So the hour is divided. What is happening now feels like interruption. What is absent feels more real. Work seems further from truth than rest, speech further than silence, contact further than withdrawal.

Then stillness becomes something to get back to, something to protect, something the self believes it has when life is quiet enough.

Relief appears, and the mind calls it truth.

But relief is not yet truth.

A phone rings.
Someone speaks.
A task needs doing.

And almost at once stillness is imagined as absent.

But it is not waiting behind sound, behind thought, behind the world, as though life were a curtain and stillness the secret kept behind it.

A sound appears, and stillness is imagined behind it.

A thought appears, and stillness is imagined beneath it.

A conversation happens, and stillness is imagined before it or after it, but not as the fact in which it is already happening.

The mind keeps placing peace where life is not, then wonders why it cannot remain at peace while living.

Then the search becomes endless. Quiet must be regained. Conditions must be managed. A truer room must be entered and defended.

Stillness is not elsewhere.

It does not wait behind sound.

It does not leave when the hour fills with ordinary things.

Then work is no longer lower than quiet.

Speech is no longer lower than silence.

Contact is no longer lower than withdrawal.

What falls away is not sound, thought, or the world.

Only the old mistake that peace lives somewhere else.