Coming Back to the Quiet
This week, my thoughts have been circling around meditation. Not the dramatic kind. Not the perfectly consistent, incense lit, sunrise version. Just the honest, human kind. The kind you pick up, put down, and one day decide to return to with gentler hands. I first learned meditation about five years ago, when I was working remotely in a rural setting. Life then had a natural softness to it. No commute. A quiet neighborhood. Days with structure but little noise. I was new to the practice, and like a child learning how to write for the first time, I gave it my full attention. All my energy sat in that one place. It worked beautifully. Somewhere along the way, about three years later, the consistency disappeared. Not dramatically. It just… slipped. I didn’t know why, and I didn’t interrogate it. Life had changed. I had changed. Fast forward to now. A new job. An urban environment. Faster pace. More stimulation. More demands. And with that shift, I realized I had quietly lost a part ...