Standing Still

Location

I was in the High Street of my home town today and bumped into an old buddy from my rugby playing days. We occasionally meet up this seemingly random way – where the paths of my going from A to B in my life and his going from A to B in his life cross.

Nothing unusual in that, you might think and say, and you’d be right - even though we rarely meet at the rugby club and yet, more often than not, we meet in the High Street.

So what sparked off something particularly notable this time round?

“Have you noticed, Pete,” he said, “that when you stop walking for a while you meet and say hello to a lot more people you know than you would have done had you kept walking. In the act of my stopping to talk to you I’ve seen a load more people I know than I would have usually done here on the High Street.”

On any given day, the street corners stand four square and witness many, many people who know each other passing by WITHOUT knowing the others have or will be there. The pivotal element, that only the static nature of the street corner owns, is that it is always present for itself and for us all.

Time Out – Time In

There’s a message here about how life unfolds and how we can, by slowing down or occasionally stopping, be far more engaged with what’s happening around us. In other words, we become – for a short period of time – like the street corner.

Of course, this only happens when we take the opportunity to calibrate our perceptual filters beyond our own “four walls” – what might be termed as our “walls of thought.” However, the mere act of slowing, and especially stopping, our physical AND mental motion, seems to open up for us the subculture of another world entirely.

To put it another way, we have literally no idea how much is going on outside of our perception except to say that it is an infinite amount. And thus it is, without doubt, a certainty that beyond the narrow bandwidth of “our world” is a world of infinite possibilities that we would happily describe as an alternative universe.

To be fair, we are talking more about a whole range of alternative universes here, which is somewhat mind-boggling in its magnitude. And what is it that holds this entire cosmic edifice together?

TIME

Now there are many perspectives on Time - and how ever many of these perspectives and meanings we hold in our lives, goes to make up our Understanding of the Language of Time. This then gives us our Sense of Time.

The particular perspective of Time I encountered today with my old sporting buddy was relative Time. Not just the micro-detail of his unfolding life through time relative to mine, but also the bigger detail of the whole consequence of that unfolding and its relationship with pausing with stillness, being in motion and synchronising location.

And, as I reminded him, he never got to know so many people in the first place by just standing still!

Thought

I was churning over some persistent and familiar thoughts today and bumped into an old chestnut that keeps coming back to haunt me. Mr Chestnut and I occasionally meet up this seemingly random way – where the pathways of my life become littered with incursions of energy that seem to come from somewhere out there yet look convincingly like they were my property all along.

Nothing unusual in that, you might say, and you probably feel that that was right. After all, our thoughts are always with us and they must be ours because they’re right there, in our Minds. We can’t avoid them or tell them to go away since they can be very, very persistent.

So what noteworthy piece of inner dialogue got sparked off this time round?

“Have you noticed, Pete,” I said, “that if you pause your thinking for a while you encounter a lot less of what you know than you would have done had you kept thinking. In the act of my stopping to talk to you I’ve seen a load more of what I don’t know than I would have usually done.”

In any given conscious moment, the thoroughfares and street corners of our Minds witness many, many thoughts just flowing by, yet if we are looking for what we know and are familiar with then we’ll filter out all the others, and only say hello to those we already know . The pivotal element, that can either imprison or liberate us, is that the power of thought is always present – and that no part of that stream is ours until we make it so.

“Is rain wet?
Not until it comes into contact with something – rain then makes that thing, whatever it is, wet. Rain, of itself, is never wet – it is merely rain.”

Conclusion

Pausing and standing still, for a period of time, is vitally important in our lives. We take stock of what is going on, we notice more about our surroundings, we recharge our batteries, we replenish and give ourselves “ME” time. Standing still enables reflection and renewal within us, both physically and mentally. It recalibrates our senses, and sharpens our perceptions – and it shows us perspectives that we lose when we are in constant motion, or that we never have when are in no motion at all.

So, to broaden our understanding of how we can enrich our lives we need both to get out more, and to regularly pause and stand still.