Something interesting happens when you stop long enough. The thoughts you have been outrunning start catching up with you. Sometimes what arrives is gratitude. Sometimes it is grief. Sometimes it is a memory you have not thought about in twenty years. Sometimes it is an uncomfortable truth that has been patiently waiting for enough silence to finally be heard.
I think a lot about dreams., The weird ones that arrive in the middle of the night carrying some strange message before disappearing again by breakfast. You wake up knowing it meant something, but the harder you try to hold onto it, the faster it slips away. Life feels a bit like that sometimes. We are all holding onto something temporary, even when we pretend we are not.
What daily habit do you do that improves your quality of life?
When I stop, I find myself thinking about people who are gone. Family members who once felt permanent and now exist mostly as stories and photographs. I think about old versions of myself. The kid who loved weird animals, horror movies, biology and drawing monsters in the margins of his school books. Some dreams survived the journey. Others quietly dissolved somewhere along the way.
Then there are other moments when I stop thinking altogether. Not in some enlightened guru on a mountaintop kind of way. More in the way a Thorny Devil exists. It is not lying awake at three in the morning wondering whether it should have taken a different career path. It is not scrolling through bad news from the other side of the planet while comparing itself to other Thorny Devils. It is simply where it is. On a patch of Australian dirt, under an impossibly large sky, doing its best Thorny Devil impression.
I think most animals understand something we have forgotten. They live in the now, but not the watered down version of now that gets sold to us. Not doing the dishes while mentally packing lunchboxes, answering emails and replaying an argument from six years ago. I mean really here. A bag of meat, bones, bacteria and borrowed stardust standing on a beautiful ball of rock floating through infinity. Somehow against all odds we got a turn. We got to love people, create things, watch sunsets, make mistakes and be alive for a little while.
Most of us are drowning in information while starving for awareness. We know what happened on the other side of the world five minutes ago, but we cannot remember the last time we stood outside and listened to the wind moving through the trees. We know what strangers think about politics, celebrities and the latest outrage, but we have forgotten to ask ourselves what we think. We spend so much time looking outward that we lose sight of the person doing the looking.
Stopping does not magically solve anything. It does not pay the bills or remove responsibilities. The animals still need feeding. The dishes still need washing. Life still turns up tomorrow with its usual collection of demands and inconveniences. What stopping does is remind me that I am more than the list of things I need to get done.
I think that matters because one day all of this disappears. The farm, the projects, the worries, the plans and the unfinished ideas. One day the whole thing dissolves like a dream you can almost remember. Before that happens, I would like to have spent some time actually noticing that I was here.
Andy C Marshall 