"I can be moving or I can be still, but still is still moving to me"

This morning I was confronted with the words of Jello Biafra, of the Dead Kennedys... which I am sure have a deeper origin; however, I am unconcerned with the origin, but rather it is the content of the phrase that struck me.

I have been struggling with the concept of Stillness lately. It seems that I am always rushing. Everywhere I go and everything I do seems to have a time and date stamp on it, and I am not one of those people who have to be constantly busy booking multiple appointments in a day and accepting every invitation. I take pleasure in sitting and reading a book, sipping a cup of coffee, or basking in the sunshine. I wonder when it was, that we as a society, stopped working to live and started living to work. Who likes their job, really? Doesn't everyone complain? Why is it that we rush, rush, rush each morning, allow ourselves to be held hostage for eight hours at a time and nobody sees the crime in this? How has this become the norm?

When I was in Spain last fall I was poking around a little shop looking for the perfect Spanish silver ring when this little old lady approached me and uttered in her broken English, "Closed, siesta" – here is a culture that has their priorities straight. She asked me, a potential paying customer, to leave her store as it was time for a nap. Can you imagine? This sort of mentality would never fly in the "No rest zone" of North America. Also, customer service was non-existent as everyone hated their job, they didn't paint on that shellacked plastic smile, or utilize the fake phone voice. I loved it; I revelled in the disdain for work, and praised them for their appreciation of leisure time.

I think that we have conditioned ourselves to be continually switched on. I come home from work where I exist all day as my alter ego: pleasant, polite, proper, and any other positive adjectives you can think of. I then ride home on a packed bus and am forced to listen to 9 different cell phone conversations and the same amount of different music blasting from peoples shoddy personal music devises, creating a cacophony of noise, which, in the best situation, is offensive to the ears. We have become programmed for continual distraction, so much so that we don’t know what to do with ourselves when not being berated by oral and visual assault. What happened to decompressing after a day at work, what happened to quiet reflection?

Noise is everywhere around us, it is so all encompassing that silence has almost become unnerving. And how about the art of conversation, where did it run off to? We have traded in small talk for oral abuse, I realise that chatting with a complete stranger is unappealing to some, but are we not taking it too far? This is reinforcing our individualistic and solitary society that depends on personal technological devises to keep each other at a distance- to avoid any form of communal atmosphere.

When I get home and am alone the very first thing I do is to put on some music. Is this because of a deep love for music- Yes- but perhaps it is also that I am unaccustomed to the buzz of electricity, and being alone with only my thoughts as companions is unsettling. Or, maybe it just sets the mood or tone of my atmosphere; do I have a desire to have a soundtrack set to my life, with various music to define my capricious whims? Perhaps it runs deeper than that, perhaps the passion and emotion contained within music is what we crave from each other and as we become more solitary we search for other means of attaining these sentiments. My roommate recounted a podcast that stated that people complain that life is rushing past us and that they cannot keep up, but is not life that is doing the rushing, rather it is us that cannot take the time to stop, reflect, listen and just plain exist. We all need to step away from the extraneous factors of this society, take some time, and search inwardly, do some personal reflection and ensure that our actions and aspirations are aligned.

So, in this sense, I do believe, that to attain something as precious and rare as Stillness would be undeniably moving.