From chaos to stillness

The first day I attempted a short silent meditation in a quiet corner of my house, my mind felt like a jail I was trapped in. My thoughts were consumed with breaking the oppressive silence, which seemed deafeningly loud, and my focus was fixated on the alarm set to go off in ten minutes. Those few minutes felt unusually long, each minute, like an hour. When I opened my eyes, I realised how chaotic my inner world was - it struggled to remain still even for a brief moment.

After multiple days of such attempts, which only led to frustration, dejection, and unrest, I had a crucial revelation: the journey from chaos to stillness can only begin when I become comfortable with the reality within. There was simply no other way. The next day, I sat with my chaos, observing it as if that were my sole purpose. I acknowledged that the chaos was a part of me, something I needed to accept, love, and respect. In this realisation, I unintentionally embarked on a wonderful journey of self-acceptance and compassion.

This experience got me thinking of how the world would have been deprived of many great inventions and concepts if the inventors had not valued the power of a quiet moment. Isaac Newton's inspiration for the law of gravity supposedly came when he saw an apple fall from a tree. Albert Einstein often credited his groundbreaking ideas to periods of quiet thought. His famous thought experiments, such as imagining riding alongside a beam of light, came to him during these quiet moments. James Watt had a breakthrough idea while reflecting on a problem with the Newcomen steam engine during a walk in a park. He realised that adding a separate condenser would improve the efficiency of the steam engine, a pivotal innovation that played a crucial role in the Industrial Revolution. Richard Feynman often attributed his breakthroughs in quantum electrodynamics to periods of relaxed, quiet thought. 

Buddha, Jesus, and other great sages also demonstrated and taught us that stillness possesses tremendous power and can lead to profound transformation.

Yet, despite these great examples, we often overlook the importance of stillness, succumbing instead to the noise created by a few loud voices seeking to assert their dominance.

To reach the destination of stillness, we have to walk through the path of chaos - the state that our mind has been accustomed to through  many collective years of human existence. That is the toughest part: to be comfortable with the chaos, to make that start, and to gradually move towards stillness. The power of stillness is great, and it begins with the simple act of sitting quietly and accepting ourselves.