Have you ever been on a bicycle with your feet strapped in… and come to a stoplight? You remember that feeling. You start to wobble. You try to resist. You’re hovering in space… fighting gravity… in a silent battle with time. Without forward movement, you know it’s only a matter of a few seconds before you have to put a foot down.
But for a moment, a split-second in time, there you are… balanced over the tires… not moving… in perfect centeredness. What if you could stay that way… indefinitely? Well, you can. You just need to find something to hold onto. Sometimes it’s a telephone pole… sometimes it’s a mailbox.
Sometimes it’s STILLNESS itself.
That feeling of total attention, total presence, is scary yet exhilarating at the same time. It’s touch and go from one millisecond to the next. You’re hyper-aware, and from this moment of perfect stillness, the world teaches you a few things.
In this incredible present, with zero velocity, you are definitely not going anywhere. For once, you have no destination. You are totally HERE. You have zero desires… all you can focus on is not falling. And as you hear the world’s gears slow down, screeching to a metallic halt, suddenly movement itself is seen as an illusion… that everyone is here with you in the same place… unmoving and perfectly still.
You see that no one is going anywhere. No one is moving, or changing. Those were just levels of distraction. Some people put their foot down at the stoplight, some don’t. But you see there’s nowhere to put a foot down, either. We are all standing stock still, surrounded by the illusion of movement. And then it dawns on you:
You are NO ONE, and so is everyone else. Without movement, we’re all just bluffing, waiting for a stoplight to change, impatient to get distracted again. And there it is, finally – the green light! – and we’re off again… back in the game.
And yet… for that one beautiful, endless moment, we were all in Perfect Stillness. In the Center of the Universe. As ONE.
Joy Biscuits 