Last January, I began waking before dawn without an alarm — not from anxiety, but from a quiet certainty that the day had already started. I lay in my dark Vermont apartment listening to the heating pipes tick and chose to stop fighting the stillness.
Learning to Arrive
The first weeks were difficult. My mind cycled through tomorrow’s tasks and unfinished conversations, restless and insistent. But around the fourth week, the thoughts began to thin — not disappear, but thin, the way fog lifts slowly from a lake at sunrise.
Stillness is not the absence of movement — it is the moment you stop narrating and simply watch.