It Is Okay To Be Still

     A couple weeks ago, when I was busy with school and activities and church, I set my laptop background to a simple white, floral design with the words "be still". Since then, school, activities, and business with church have quieted and for the past week my life has been very still. It's been quiet, calm, free of stress. At first, this was obviously very welcome. But then, as I continued to come home every day from class with little to do compared to my normal hustle and bustle, and especially compared to the chaos that is the lives of my friends, I thought that I was for sure doing something wrong. Should I start preparing for my midterm two weeks in advance? Should I stay up all night and write that paper that's due next Friday all in one sitting? Should I join another club, volunteer more, get a job, become a mechanical engineering biochem double major?????? Surely I am doing something wrong if I'm not pulling all-nighters, if I'm not surviving on three hours of sleep and four cups of coffee, if I can't get a minute of free time into my schedule. That's what this world tells me. I look at my friends, who are all hard majors--biology, chemistry, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, biochemistry--and who all also have jobs, run clubs, volunteer, AND manage to do things like exercise, eat healthy, and go to church, and I think to myself "These women are superhuman. What am I doing? Napping at 5PM because I only got 8 hours of sleep? Taking an hour to read 10 pages? Eating ice cream for dinner????" I can't help but compare myself to them and think that I don't quite measure up. I'm not as smart (at least not if we're measuring it by what is traditionally valued as "smart" (math and science)), I'm not as dedicated (I can think of nothing I'm passionate enough about to start a whole club on), I have no desire to get a job AND be a student (nor do I think I could juggle both), and the idea of taking a physics midterm makes me nauseous (I actually had a nightmare in which I had to take a college physics class. It was awful).

     I think these things about myself and I realize that what it comes down to is that a) I still have this ridiculous need to prove my worth through actions and b) I do not know how to truly be still. Life is really not at all about what you do. When someone dies, their loved ones don't stand up and talk about the volunteer organizations they were a part of in college, or how many awards they received, or what their GPA was, or how many all-nighters they pulled studying their little butts off. They don't talk about how much money they made, or how high they managed to climb the corporate ladder, or heck, how often they ate salads and ran marathons. They talk about how they were kind, or generous, or funny, or adventurous, or carefree, or crazy or wild or full of life. They talk about how they made them feel. How they touched their lives.
     But to make people feel loved, to touch people's lives, to be generous and kind and full of life, you first must slow down, take a step back, and be still. It's in the stillness that you are able to grow and evaluate yourself and your life and decide who you want to be and where you want to go from here. It's in the stillness that you are able to think of your family and friends and make sure they're doing okay. It's in the stillness that you have time to pray, time to take care of yourself and your health and happiness. Chaos is a great distraction from having to actually sit down and self-assess. The world tells us that if we are not busy, that if we have time to take a nap or drink a cup of tea or read a book or watch a movie, we are being selfish or lazy or boring. But I think the world is just jealous. Because in those moments of stillness we find ourselves. We reconnect. We let ourselves breathe and just be. We refuel and refill, so that we may pour out the best version of ourselves into the lives of those around us. When we allow ourselves to slow down and be still, we pour out not the tired, worn out, stressed out, angry, bitter selves that have given too much and taken too little, but the selves that are refreshed by peacefulness and quietude, the selves that are able to turn their backs on the chaos of a world that is never satisfied.

-SE Wagner