Stillness

Hesychia — and the presence of the space

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Read this sentence aloud, slowly, and listen not to the words but to what lies between them. Before each word, a small silence. After it, another. The silence makes no sound, and yet without it there would be no word at all — only a single unbroken noise in which nothing could be heard. The space is not the absence of the word. The space is what lets the word be received.

We do not often grant the space any presence of its own. We take it for nothing — a gap, an emptiness, a waiting to be filled. But I have come to believe the space is not empty at all. It has presence. It has value. It says the thing the word alone cannot say.

Everything that exists is in motion. To be is to vibrate; the moment a thing ceases altogether to move, in its smallest and innermost part, it ceases to be. And yet — here is the wonder — within that ceaseless movement there is stillness. In every wave there is a moment of stillness. At the very turn, where the wave has risen as far as it will rise and is about to fall, there is an instant when it is not moving at all. Without that still point the wave could not be a wave. We even measure the wave from one stillness to the next. The movement we see. The stillness we tend not to. But the stillness was there the whole while, holding the movement together from the inside.

Our trouble is not that we have too much motion. Our trouble is that we have gone deaf to the space. We notice only what we are doing, never what we are not doing — and if ever we do notice the not-doing, it is because someone has named it laziness, or we have accused ourselves of it. We have made the empty space a fault to be corrected, when it was never empty, and never a fault.

See how much of our living is the rushing to fill a space that was asking only to be left.

Someone wounds us, and before the breath has settled we are already striking back. We are, so much of the time, out upon the flesh — out to get back at the one who got us, willing to unleash the whole arsenal, because we feel justified. We tell ourselves the other is as selfish as we are, so our selfishness had better be the greater, or we shall be swallowed up. And there is another word we might have heard in that moment, but it is not convenient, and it does not serve us, and so we let it pass. The word is mercy. And mercy is simply the space left in the response — the room we refuse to fill.

There is an old saying we all believe we know: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. We quote it to justify our retaliation. But I have come to hear it differently. I hear it as no more than an eye for an eye; no more than a tooth for a tooth. The no more is the whole of it. For in the days before that word, if you took my finger I might take your head and call it justice — you started it, after all. The no more sets a limit on how reckless I may be in the name of having been wronged. It leaves a space in the reply. It is a measured response — and the measure is the space.

This is what it is to recognise the other. Not to give myself away entirely, and not to erase you — but to leave a space between us, and to stand for a moment inside it. To put myself in your place. To wonder how my own action may have helped to shape yours. To stop pretending I am innocent — for not one of us is innocent; we all carry our motives and our own small agendas. The pause is where all of that becomes possible. Take away the pause, and there is no room to let anything go, no room to renew, no room to turn the other cheek and begin again.

We have done the same at the largest scale. We have lost the community, and — stranger still — we have lost the person, though the two can only live by each other: the community needs the person, and the person needs the community. Somewhere we began to believe we could go off on our own and do just as well. We moved away from the places that held us, and called the small unit we carried with us a family entire in itself, and told ourselves it would be enough. With each new convenience, we have needed one another a little less, until we scarcely touch. And still we write more and more law to plug the holes — and never notice the one thing we keep plugging: the open space where we used to meet.

Activity and rest. Doing and being. Myself and the other. These are not two halves to be weighed one against the other. They are a presence, and the space that lets it be — and we have honoured only the one.

So I offer you, and myself, a small and quiet practice. Not something to achieve. There is nothing here to be done, only something to be allowed — though I know that even the allowing can feel like a kind of doing. Call it, then, the kind of doing that lets being become visible. Seek out, in the middle of an ordinary day, a moment simply to be. And let it come, too, in the middle of a conversation: while another is speaking, do not spend their words preparing your reply; do not answer the sentence that has not yet been said. Leave the space. Let them finish into it. And hear them — perhaps for the first time — from somewhere other than where you have always listened.

That is the whole of it. There is a presence in the space. There has been, all along.

Stillness.

Hesychia.