day seventeen: stillness
All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
-Blaise Pascal
The word business comes from Middle English—the state of being busy. But as time passed, business and busyness referred to different things and yet there’s an undeniable similarity between the two. This past year has forced the majority of us into greater stillness. For some of us this shift has been very jarring, like hitting a wall in a speeding car. For others, it’s been a long-needed change of pace. Some of us have resisted the stillness and some of us have embraced it.
During Shelter-in-Place, my household along with other friends on Zoom, read Hope for the Flowers. This story, written in 1972 by Trina Paulus, tells the tale of a caterpillar named Stripe who after being born, crawls around and eats for a while and then feels like there has to be more to life than eating. Other caterpillars must feel this same impulse because there’s a huge pile where caterpillars are climbing over each other to get to the top. Then Stripe meets Yellow and the idea of stepping on her head to get ahead doesn’t seem right. Yellow leaves the pile, but Stripe can’t quiet the voices that tell him that he’s meant to ascend. Seeing no other way, he keeps climbing.
The instinct to rise was correct but the method was wrong.
Yellow, too, wanted to get higher so she went off and became a butterfly. From her new vantage point she could see that there were hundreds of piles of caterpillars all going nowhere. They didn’t need to busy themselves with the business of crushing and killing themselves and each other—they needed to slow down, to go inward and to sit in the stillness where they would become the glorious beings they were born to be.
Like the caterpillars, we too have bought into the false notion that climbing to the apex of nothing might make us happy. We sacrifice so much to get somewhere that rarely leaves us fulfilled. We place great value on money, titles, awards and accolades. From research, one of the top five regrets people mention on their deathbed is, I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. Before the coronavirus pandemic, it seemed to me that the pace of the world wasn’t sustainable. Something had to shift, but what?
In recent months, I keep hearing the story of what happens to a caterpillar before it enters a cocoon. It becomes The Very Hungry Caterpillar and eats hundreds of times its weight in food. This period of overconsumption and busyness is what leads to its transformation. What if everything that led up to this moment—our lack of respect for the earth and each other—was an unfortunate part of our evolution? What if we’re not in a time-out from Mother Nature as some suggest? Instead, what if we’re in our cocoons preparing to become what we were born to be: beautiful and free? What if we’re leaving behind our lives of crawling and readying ourselves for our natural state of soaring?
Reflective Journal Prompts
Can you identify times in your life when your striving or busyness took you away from more important things or people?
What is the current state of stillness allowing you to hear? What is it beckoning you to notice about who you are or who you could become?
Discussion Prompts
Talk about what’s becoming possible because of this time of cocooning.
Suggested Action
Watch the movie Parasite — available on Hulu.
For children (of any age), draw pictures of caterpillars and butterflies. Ask whether they feel more like a caterpillar or a butterfly and why. Post your drawings on Instagram with #thewhenisnow or in our Facebook group.
Further Reading
My friend sent me this interesting piece Why Rich People Are So Mean? about how generosity and empathy often decrease as one’s wealth increases.