Stillness and Motion (short story)

By Luke Labern

The ambition that had swept him along like a great wind suddenly dropped. He realised that he could no longer partake in the society that had reared him. All around him felt exceptionally still. The motions that had brought him to where he now stood became impossible to continue. Within seconds he realised that all motion was contingent. He had been moving, but now he had stopped. As he stood, focusing only on his breath, he became aware of the ceaseless motion of others. He had never stood still before. The closest he had come was when he had fallen; but even then, he had not taken the time to pause, be still and truly reflect. He had crawled, and stumbled, and done his best to get back up.

Now he glimpsed what it might mean to be still, even for a moment.

At first, this was not simple. Though he no longer felt any desire to move because others were moving, there remained within him an innate prompt: it told him to ‘move or die’. His muscles twitched and convulsed. His heart began to race uncomfortably.

He almost obeyed this impulse, which had raised its voice for the first time in a long time, but finally clenched and contracted his muscles and remained still. He would not move; he would not be moved, even by his own impulses.

The stillness continued. Though he had simply stopped moving, and was now seemingly doing less than he was before, it felt as though he had entered a new world. For the first time he consciously reflected on what it meant not to be in motion.

‘How can something so simple be so difficult?’

A strange feeling crept up on him, as he remained where he was: it started somewhere around his lower legs and wrapped itself around his body, ascending his torso and settling on his face. He could trace its trail by the hair it raised on his skin. This was excitement: excitement from doing nothing, or at least very little. This brief creeping sensation, a kind of inverted anxiety, brought with it a wave of calm. After only a few seconds, he realised that he had known this calm before.

This was the calm he had felt at his most secure. He had known this calm rarely, but remembered it fondly: this was the calm that arose when he was caressed by his parents as a child, when he would stroke the inside of his father’s forearm and marvel at his soft skin; this was the calm he felt when he had received the grade he had been after in the exam; this was the calm he felt in the moment of orgasm. This calm was not of the same intensity; it shifted moment-by-moment. It was the same calm, however; he was sure of it.

As he stood still, quite overwhelmed that such a simple act could yield such a profound reaction in him, a revelation occurred to him: he had never felt this calm for so long. Reflecting on the times in his life when he had felt so at ease, it became clear to him that those moments had only ever been fleeting. His father had eventually left him in his bed, with a house and a life to attend to; the exam he had conquered was quickly forgotten, and replaced by a new exam, an endless stream of exams; the moment of orgasm quickly faded, and left in its place a kind of guilt. This calm was different. It had already lasted longer than any of these other forms had. They had been pizzicato pleasures; this was a long note of sustained peace. Life played legato. Its peak was not as high, perhaps, but it felt sustainable.

The calm gave way to excitement as he realised that he might be able to control it.

‘Perhaps’, he thought, ‘the calm comes when I am still.’

This thought gave way onto another, and this new thought sent a shiver down his spine.

‘What if the calm is not something in me… what if the calm is not something that I should seek, but something that is always present? Perhaps I am not experiencing something new; perhaps I am not adding calm, but subtracting all that distracts from it.’

He looked around him once again. Those who he had been moving with had moved out of the horizon; they had been replaced by new people, but it seemed as though there was now a space between the stream of people and himself. He was separate.

‘Could it be that all that motion, all that ambition, all that seeking the future, the success, the recognition… could it be that those things were drowning out the calm?’

It was at this point that all of these thoughts, and this calm, which had hitherto been intuitive and graceful, were interrupted. Whilst the stillness and the calm had come about seemingly of themselves, quite without effort, a new, logical thought jolted him out of his calm.

Logic, which had been the great passion and power in his life, accosted him.

‘This can’t be true. My ambition is who I am. The only reason I am alive today, in a world without God, without morality, without meaning, is because of the meaning I have created for myself. Without my ambition I would not exist.’

As the terms and concepts that fuelled his life and consoled him in his darkest moments returned to his consciousness, the calm disappeared like a timid mouse, scared by a giant’s shadow. Logic penetrated the calm.

As he considered the influence of ambition in his life, he once again instinctively felt the desire to move. Those all around him, who had become a kind of unified blur, imbued him with an unpleasant thought: they were all ahead of him.

‘It is time to catch up,’ he thought.

As this short phrase entered his mind, he once again prepared to move, but stopped at the last moment.

‘No; that isn’t true. It is doing no harm to stand here.’ He remembered the calm, which now seemed a lifetime ago.

‘What is happening to me?’

He became quite confused; there appeared to be a kind of war going on in his mind. This was often the case, but this time it seemed as though the combatants were not of the same species. This was not a conflict between two thoughts, but between thoughts and something else.

As far as he could tell, rational thought had apparently curtailed what had been a spontaneous feeling of calm. This calm, this clarity, had come about when he stopped moving. Logic, he knew, gave a kind of clarity: it turned words into weapons. This clarity was different; it was as though this stillness was less about words than existence itself; less about knowledge, and meaning, and accomplishment, and more about awareness. It became clear that whilst logic was focused largely on deciphering the past and curating a better future, this calm was about experiencing the present.

It was then that he understood something that stunned him. Though he had understood the thought before, somehow it struck him.

‘If I am not content now, in the present moment, no future accomplishment will ever bring me that contentment.’

His thoughts were beginning to race now; it was difficult to tell which thoughts were contributing to the calm he felt, and which were detracting from it. This was quite different from how he had felt when the wind dropped. It almost felt as if he was moving again, such was the cacophony in his mind.

He did not like this feeling, and wanted to understand what was happening to him.

‘How did I get here?’

He had been floating in life for a little while now; he did not feel as though he had any direction. Each day became a burden; the past had begun to haunt him. His own previous achievements began to sting him. Even when he compared himself with himself, which he knew to be more fruitful than comparing himself to others, he felt miserable: how had he been so successful, powerful and strong in the past? How had he become so weak now, so devoid of direction and passion?

Standing where he was, still not having moved, he realised that whatever was happening to him might well change his life. The thought occurred to him that rather than striving for a reprise of his past successes, he might forge for himself a new chapter of his life quite unlike anything he had experienced before.

He had tried extremely hard to think his way to such a new chapter, but it seemed as though the results he was seeking were contradicted by the methods employed. ‘How could I think myself into a new frame of life,’ he would scold himself, ‘when my thoughts are constrained by the very logic I am trying to escape?’ A vicious circle had established itself and, despite his intelligence, he could not reason himself out of it.

This stillness; this calm: together, they might enable him to transcend that circle and lift him onto an altogether different plane.

‘Does it matter,’ he thought to himself, ‘where I am? Could it be that it does not matter where my body is, or where I am with regards to my life?’ It seemed to him that all places were really the same, because at all places he was there.

He opened his eyes and focused on one individual who passed him by.

‘Where is that person going? What will they find there that I do not have here? I do not know if they are running to or running from something, but I cannot help but feel that wherever they end up will not change who or what they are.’

The individual faded into the horizon.

‘What is it that that individual is seeking?’

An expression of wonder glided over his face like a stream of light.

‘Not only is it pointless to seek a goal or ambition if one cannot appreciate the present … if one can appreciate the present moment, which stands independent of all past and future achievement, then one can experience true peace at any moment.’

The profundity of this thought struck him hard; he knew that this was a realisation of the kind that could change the quality of one’s life. He worried that he might forget it, like the last image on one’s mind when one wakes from a beautiful dream, but he found calm even in this.

‘If I forget this thought, it cannot be important. If it is meaningful, and if it has the power I think it does, I will not forget it.’

When thoughts struck him as particularly important, his first impulse was to note them down. In writing them down, he thought, he was preserving what most needed to be stored. Yet he rarely returned to anything he had written. Instead, he felt only a brief sense of relief that he had transcribed what had been, at the time, a vital thought—as if he had somehow captured the present for future appreciation. This note-taking served only to spur him on to other, unrelated thoughts, much like his desire for a better future. Once he stored the note away, he would move on to the next day, the next thought. The appreciation never came, and in this way he lost the thought, and the moment, twice.

Now he realised that this approach to life was a form of denial. If he wanted to experience and embody a thought, he must keep it in his mind and study it. This was what the calm enabled to him to do. The process of thinking about one thing, and one thing only, seemed to increase the mild euphoria that accompanied the act of breathing slowly, deliberately and peacefully.

It had grown dark. The sea of motion all around him was now almost imperceptible. He could make out vague black forms only with great effort; he was otherwise alone. This had always been his favourite time: at night, particularly when it was cold. It seemed to him that life was more meaningful in these conditions. He was better able to understand time when his vision was impaired; time became less something to experience, and more something to appreciate in the abstract. The scope and narrative of his life, over and above the present moment, impressed itself on his mind. Huge waves of emotion—enigmatic blends of nostalgia, euphoria and empathy—rolled over him on winter nights. He felt more adult when the night came; more aware of what had already passed, and what was yet to come. He seemed better able to appreciate his life as a whole when it became dark. This was what he loved to do most of all.

He was delighted to find that his experience with the calm had increased his awareness of everything around him. It was as though his mind had been cleared, like a city of skyscrapers and neon lights razed to the ground. In place of scorched earth, however, were green fields, blue skies and still lakes. All was clear, tranquil and calm.

The night, as it descended upon him, brought with it a wave of nostalgia.

Although his thoughts were still centred on the power of simply being still and a growing suspicion that motion was not what he once thought it was—that is, ubiquitous—he could not help but fondly recall a time in his past when he was at his most ambitious.

It was not quite déjà vu, but it was a feeling of the same kind. It felt as though his whole life was ahead of him, just as it had been then. Things were very different now, of course: there were fewer people in his life. Bad things had happened between then and now. His life had felt less stable, less rich, less alive. Even though he believed his stillness to be the reason for this now overwhelming sense of optimism, he still had a desire to do, and to live.

‘Being still is all I need: I could live off this alone. Yet I do not have to. I am lucky to have found this, to have stumbled on this silence, this stillness… but I am also lucky to be who I am, where I am, what I am. There is still much that I want to do. There are things I long to create; people I long to meet; things I long to accomplish.’

Only moments earlier, these thoughts might have confused him. Now everything seemed clear: stillness and motion were not at war. They only appeared to be so when they were contrasted against each other; when he felt that he had to pick either the one or the other.

As he stood there in the dark—simply standing, simply thinking, simply being—he felt an appreciation for life with a clarity and simplicity he had never felt before.

‘It is good to be alive.’

He could still look to the future. He could still engage, and create, and participate. He could still better himself. But that was not necessary; he was not obligated to do any such thing.

He had always felt that freedom was the ability to do as much as possible, to do anything. Now he realised that true freedom must include the ability to do nothing.

Quite peacefully, he saw that no matter where his life took him, he would always be in the present. He would never escape himself. He would grow, and then decay, but he would always remain who he was. Though each moment would be different, each moment was successive with the last.

‘I will never gain anything more than I already have: I already have all that I will ever need. I already am all that I will ever be. Nothing I do will ever change what it is like to be alive. The present remains the same.’

He understood that what he had learned he could never have predicted. Like many of the finest moments in life, no amount of preparation, searching or effort could otherwise have yielded the wisdom he had gained—not this particular series of events, at this time in his life, with this degree of profundity.

The time had been right and he had been ready, though he had known neither of these things. Life had rewarded him.

‘It would be a mistake to think that I cannot stand still, and do nothing. It would also be a mistake to think that I cannot move, and achieve great things. The greatest mistake of all would be to think that I could choose only motion or stillness.’

He smiled to himself, there under the stars, in the dark.

‘It is good to be alive,’ he said again.

And with that, he continued his journey—quite aware that he need do no such thing.