We live in a world that glorifies motion.
Do more, learn more, scroll more.
Even our moments of rest have to mean something: mindfulness apps, step counts, productivity podcasts.
Resting has become a task.
one of the hardest things to do, truly do, is to stop.
Not to rest with purpose.
Not to recharge for the next sprint.
But to simply pause.
No intention.
No outcome.
Just… pause.
I realised this recently, in the middle of one of those long days where sleep had been short, work had been endless, and my mind was running on fumes. Everything around me was quiet, but inside my head, it felt like rush hour.
There was peace and space to stop — I could feel it — but the idea of doing nothing felt hard. All I needed was fifteen minutes in the middle of the day to reset.
I set an alarm, lay down on the sofa in my office, put my head on the cushion, and closed my eyes.
No phone. No background music. No meditation app guiding my breathing. Just the stillness of the room and whatever thoughts wanted to come and go.
And they did come. Some practical, some pointless. Random phrases, unfinished to-do lists, flashes of memory. Each one drifted in, lingered, then faded.
But I found myself checking the timer again and again, wondering how close I was to the end. Not for fear of not getting enough rest, but for fear that I was missing something — missing the need to do something.
That’s when it hit me: even in rest, I was still trying to perform. Still chasing purpose, still checking for progress.
It’s strange, isn’t it? We think of stillness as passive, but it takes effort — real effort — to allow the world to move around us. Without us actively participating in it. And yet, the world doe keep rolling when we don’t.
Stillness feels hard because it threatens the identity we’ve built around being useful, around being in motion. We have a compulsion to be busy, which isn’t quite the same as being productive. While they can overlap, they are often very different things.
3am doomscrolling is the ultimate expression of this. It feels like you’re doing something, but you’re really not. It’s not productive. It doesn’t enrich you. It rarely entertains. But it keeps you busy.
Modern life, and social media, conditions us to being in a constant state of addiction, not to progressing, but to doing stuff.
But here’s the quiet truth: when we pause, we don’t stop mattering.
We simply step aside long enough to notice that life carries on even without our constant steering.
The world doesn’t collapse when we’re still.
It breathes with us.
Pausing isn’t withdrawal.
It’s a chance to regain awareness and perspective.
It’s letting the noise settle so the signal can be heard.
It’s a modern meditation.
Maybe that’s the real “hard thing”: not climbing the next mountain, or shipping the next project, or fixing the next problem, but choosing, deliberately, to stop. To lie down. To let the thoughts drift through.
To trust that we’ll find the place our mind needs to be… if we just give it time to arrive.
Do the hard thing. Pause.
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