“When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.”
~Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks
Most everyone we know will tell us what they think is best for us, what they think we should do, what they think we should think, who they think we should be.
But the older I get, the more I understand just how sacred time really is. One of the blessings of no longer being young is how fiercely I protect what I once gave away too easily—time, space, and quiet.
Yesterday, over lunch, I told my brother: “My primary goal on Sundays is to spend a good part of it alone, in quiet, to talk to no one and to go nowhere.”
What I didn’t say—but what I know—is that without this time, I begin to lose touch with me. I fall back into the habit of heeding what others think is best, instead of listening for what Life is trying to show me.
When I give myself the gift of unstructured time—time not filled with tasks or to-dos, I feel different in my body. I can almost sense the shift physically, like a widening inside. The should-I’s begin to quiet: should I do laundry, should I clean the bathroom, should I research that thing I’m excited about?
Somewhere along the way I heard someone say, “Listen to the quiet,” and it stayed with me. Byron Katie’s words echo here: You are not breathing. You are being breathed. And I think of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot at the same time, how everything we know exists on this one suspended speck of light in a sunbeam. We are part of something infinitely bigger than our next project. And in the stillness, I feel that again.
The texture of the quiet feels like wide open space. Spacious in a way that breathes, like it’s alive. Like I’m meeting someone else entirely—but that someone is me. Not the doing-machine version of me, the one who moves from effort to effort. But the one who’s always with me, waiting beneath it all.
And the truth is, when I don’t take time to be alone and quiet, I can regress back into other people’s momentum. Their needs, their growth agendas, their urgency, their plans,… and their neurosis. And when I do that, I can’t hear my own voice. I can’t feel my own rhythm.
The cost of not listening to my soul is that I forget what I know. I lose confidence in my ideas. I can’t trust my creativity because it never had space to take form. I can’t trust myself because I never gave myself the time to listen, to know, to just be with me. That’s the erosion: not dramatic, but daily. A slow fading of my voice beneath the noise of everyone else’s.
But when I do listen—when I create even just a few hours of silence, it’s not stifling. It’s energizing. The quiet is not the absence of life, but the ground where life grows. Ideas come. Energy stirs. It’s like a homecoming. The world says self-care is something to do, but when I stop doing, that’s when confidence and self-love find me. That’s when clarity and direction return. Stillness doesn’t starve me, it feeds me.
I remember walking my dog one night when I lived in Boston. I looked up at the stars and started crying. The words came out of my mouth before I even knew I was thinking them: I can’t do what they think is best for me any longer. In that moment, the weight of living by someone else’s compass broke, and I began to find my own.
These days, I honor something like a Sabbath. Sometimes it’s a whole day. Sometimes it’s half. And every day, I carve out even just a little bit of time to go within. To meditate, to pray, to sit in the silence. These practices have changed me. They have shaped the way I speak, the way I act, the way I lead. From that space, I move differently, more grounded, less reactive. And oddly, more powerful.
Once, I let an opportunity go. I didn’t cling to it. I didn’t force it to work or make anyone wrong. I just let it pass. And then, not long after, I was offered something I never saw coming, bigger, more aligned, more impactful. It reminded me of a story Marianne Williamson tells in A Return to Love: an actor was desperate to land a role on Hill Street Blues. But had he gotten it, he would’ve missed the lead role that became his breakthrough. Sometimes we cling to something small and good, and miss the extraordinary that’s wanting to unfold.
Looking back, I say, Nothing was wrong. It was all perfect. I gave my time away easily, not because I was weak, but because I was still learning what alignment feels like. Without all those years, I wouldn’t know how to listen to my own voice now. The distance from myself wasn’t a detour; it was how I came to cherish the way home.
As Kahlil Gibran writes, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
And I’ll leave you with this from Thomas Merton. Because if there’s a single passage that names the truth of what I’ve lived, and what I now protect, it’s this:
“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence … [and that is] activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence… To surrender to too many demands… to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence… It destroys our own inner capacity for peace… It kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
I want my work to be fruitful.
But I now know the root is silence.
