Stillness

As a 60th birthday gift to myself, I joined a gym. This may not sound like a particularly profound milestone, but for me it felt like a quiet act of defiance against a year that had taken more out of me than I expected. I told myself that no matter what else life threw my way, this would be something I did for me. And somewhat to my own surprise, I have not missed a single day since I started. Every. Single. Day. Some days I work out harder than others. Some days it’s cardio, some days it’s weights, and some days the workout is generous enough to be described as “movement.” But I show up. Consistency, it turns out, is sometimes more important than intensity.
The one part of the routine I never skip is the sauna. Fifteen to twenty minutes in that heat feels like something is leaving my body that has been stuck there for too long. I’m sure there are impressive physiological explanations for why this is good for me, and I’m happy to claim all the health benefits experts talk about. But what I notice most are the mental ones. Sitting in that heat, sweating out the day, feels like a release valve for the parts of grief and stress that quietly accumulate in the body. Apparently grief is not only emotional, it is also very committed to setting up residence in my shoulders.
Most of my days are anything but quiet. Teaching means I am “on” from the moment I walk into the building. Decisions, conversations, explanations, encouragement, redirection…lather, rinse and repeat. My brain rarely gets a break. After school there are more conversations, more responsibilities, and the drive home is usually spent catching up with friends or returning calls that have been waiting patiently for my attention. My life is full of people, which is a blessing I do not take lightly, but it also means that stillness is not something that naturally appears in my day.
Then I get to the gym and something shifts.
No one there knows me. No one knows my story or the things I am carrying. No one knows about my grief, my pride, my resilience, or the complicated chapters that have brought me to this moment. To them I am simply another person on a treadmill or lifting a weight or quietly existing in the corner of the sauna. I am just taking up space, which turns out to be incredibly freeing.
It is the same now when I walk or run. I put my phone on do not disturb and go. No one is asking questions, no one needs answers, and no one expects anything from me. It was never that way before until now. I do not have to explain myself or justify my emotions or revisit demons I am not particularly interested in entertaining that day. It is just me and my thoughts. The ones I choose to engage with and the ones that show up uninvited, which…if we are being honest… is how most thoughts operate anyway.
Recently I have also attended a few meditation sessions, which has been an interesting development for someone whose mind has historically operated like a browser with 47 tabs open at once. I learned about the “monkey mind,” the restless mental chatter that hops from one thought to another without ever fully settling. Sitting in stillness does not come naturally to me. In fact, the first time I tried it, my brain seemed determined to remind me of everything from my grocery list I forgot to buy in 2007.
But something interesting happened afterward. When the meditation ended, I felt an immense sense of peace, followed by a kind of exhaustion that feels strangely familiar. It is the same tiredness you feel after running a long race. Apparently, sitting still with your thoughts can be just as demanding as running a marathon—who knew?
Grief has changed the rhythm of my life in ways I am still learning to understand. There is a natural tension in being human between belonging and solitude. We need connection, community, laughter, and the comfort of knowing someone else is walking beside us. But we also need solitude. We need quiet spaces where we can sit with our thoughts and make sense of the emotions that don’t always behave politely enough to appear on a convenient schedule.
When grief enters your life, that rhythm becomes exaggerated. Some days you crave the presence of other people because being alone feels like standing in an echo chamber of sadness. Other days even the smallest interaction feels overwhelming, and what you want most is silence. The pendulum swings back and forth between connection and solitude, and learning to follow that rhythm becomes part of the work of healing.
The truth is that much of grief is experienced alone. In those quiet hours, when the world is not asking anything of us, we sit with loss and slowly begin the difficult work of understanding it. In that stillness, sorrow begins to transform. It becomes deeper, more complex, and eventually…. if we allow it…. something that can expand our capacity for compassion.
My therapist and others who have gently guided me through this season keep telling me the same thing: the answers I am searching for will come in the stillness.
This is mildly inconvenient advice for someone who was raised to believe that movement equals progress and productivity equals worth. I was conditioned to stay busy, stay useful, and stay in motion. Rest was seen as weakness and sitting still was NEVER an option. If you were tired, you probably just needed to work harder. If you were struggling, the solution was to keep going in order to outrun it.
Stillness was never presented or accepted as an option.
So learning to sit quietly with my thoughts has become its own kind of practice. I am learning that movement does not always have to be loud or fast to count. Sometimes movement is subtle. Sometimes it is simply the act of allowing yourself to feel something instead of outrunning it.
Either way, I am worthy.
Either way, I am doing enough.
So these days I find myself gravitating toward the quiet places more often. The sauna. The treadmill. A long walk where no one knows my name and no one needs anything from me. No music, no books, no phone calls—just the noise of my own brain, which, depending on the day, can be the loudest sound in the world.
Learning to listen to that noise…. and eventually quiet it…. is a skill I am still developing.
Slowly.
And I am beginning to suspect that slowly might be exactly the pace that grief requires.

Peace,
#tutulady
#forwardisapace