theblackdostoyevsky

What’s the most underrated life skill?

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Despite the contemporary popularity of ancient Eastern mystic practices, as a community we have cultivated little to no capability in a skill as vital to human survival as eating.

Consider the efficacy of bodily exercise. Without rest, you are merely ripping and tearing down your musculature and grinding down the cartilage between your bones, and you would eventually become a crippled and broken being saddled with acute and chronic pain, both.

Consider the wisdom and provisional benefits of work. Without sleep, you are simply taxing your senses and faculties until you would, eventually, devolve into hallucinating madness and hysteria.

Consider thought and the virtues of reflection, whatever upon. Thought helps solve problems, set goals, master abilities, recall joys, debrief errors. And yet, if the mind were set to spinning its webs continually, you would sink into paranoid delusions, riddled with manic episodes of anxiety and depression.

Consider your heart, your metaphorical heart, and the emotions and imaginations it perceives and reacts to. Every human interaction, whether acknowledged or not, ladens the heart with weight. Ever passed a person on a lonely street without either of you speaking? Every pained heart isn’t broken. Some are just hairline fractured in a million places. Living in cities forces us into a neurotic pace of human interaction that, if we do not seek regular solitude from, will deaden our emotional nerves to our own feelings, and thus, the feelings of others.

You ever sat still long enough for a painful memory to surface and, just as it begins to crystallize in your imagination, the remembered discomfort wells up from your bowels and into your heart like a flood of scalding water into your chest and the only thing you can do to rid yourself of the horror of the fear of the oncoming agony is to scream aloud, to exorcise the memory from your consciousness? That’s when you get up and go separate the laundry. Or learn to play the harmonica. And that’s why stillness is a skill.

“Be still and know that I am God,” He says, knowing how difficult an admonition it is to obey. And then consider that, in order to know that He is God you must, first, be still. So it stands to reason that, if you cannot be still you cannot know that He is God. And I don’t mean intellectually; I mean experientially. After Pharoah had, after ten plagues, sent the children of Israel from Egypt in a fury of grief, he afterwards came to himself and pursued after his former slaves with the entire power of Egypt behind him. The children of Israel, then, were trapped between the army of the most powerful nation on the planet and the Red Sea. And what did Moses tell them?

“Fear ye not, and stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord . . .”

Certain death behind you. Depression. An impassable chasm ahead. Anxiety.

Don’t move.

And yet we’re taught that if you don’t save yourself, there is no one coming to save you. Even if you are not to blame, you are responsible. So, rise and grind. No days off. Hustle and gig. You can sleep when you’re dead. Fill the stream of life. Climb that ladder. Beat on your craft. No rest for the weary. Just Do It. Think Different. Live Mas. Because you’re worth it. America Runs on Dunkin. It Gives You Wings. Let’s Go Places. Keep Going, and Going, and Going. The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection. Be All that You Can Be. Good to the Last Drop. Go Further. Do More. Expect More; Pay Less. Once you Pop, You Can’t Stop. Live in Your World, Play in Ours. Belong Anywhere. Moving Forward. Do What You Can’t. Move the Way you Want. Is it in You?

Everything but sit your ass down and be still. Because the more you’re kept running, the less opportunity God has to put His hands in the mess you’re constantly making of your life in your sleep-deprived, caffeine-induced, drug-fueled, anxiety-riddled, depression-avoiding, relationship-straining, work/life unbalanced, debt-financed, nutrient-deficient, half-dehydrated, on the cusp of obesity, pre-diabetic, blood-pressure spiking, arrhythmia-creating, gaze-glazing, breath-catching, palm-trembling, ankle-swelling pursuit of . . .

What?

Freedom? Peace? Income? Legacy? Longevity? Notoriety? Fame? Honor? Respect? Acceptance?

Or maybe what you’re after is just, please . . .

Not Slavery. Not War. Not Poverty. Not a Terminal Diagnosis. Not Oblivion. Not Irrelevance. Not Disrespect. Not Rejection.

In America, we hate to lose more than we love to win. So, we run, because we can control running, even if I’m disintegrating back into the earth with every stride.

We die, “At least I tried.“

But we refuse stillness. We can’t stomach it. We feel like we’re wasting time. FOMO kicks in. We imagine everyone else is making progress while we’re stagnant. We fear falling behind. Gotta upskill. Gotta network. Gotta keep these relationships lubricated. Gotta, at least, have a package en route; a down payment on future effort.

It’s a skill to be still. It takes more effort not to do than to do. How ironic.

One of my favorite Leonardo DaVinci quotes is this:

“Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least . . .”

. . . because when you finally decide that your codependency isn’t serving you, that you can’t orchestrate your own success or failure, and that what other people choose is out of your hands, and that their opinions of you are none of your business, and that everything you need you already possess, then you’ll consent to sit down, and then wait. And when you wait is when He shows up. And after He shows up, won’t nobody need to convince you; you’ll know that He is God.