One of the most talented actors I ever worked with taught me a lesson one day in 1979 that I have used every day since. She posed the question, what would I do in an acting exercise where I was on stage with other actors and the goal was to gain more attention from the audience than any of the others.
Being smart enough to be dangerous, I immediately eliminated from consideration anything having to do with traditional performing practice. Being young and narcissistic, I figured the only thing left was to take off my clothes. Being experienced, she applauded my first instinct. Being wise, she rejected my second. The answer, she schooled me, is to be still. An audience is profoundly intoxicated by authentic stillness.
Currently, I spend all day every day accompanying the experience of extreme suffering and loss. I do my best to be a benign presence in that place—part neutralizer, part comforter, part truth-teller. By far the biggest difference I make derives from the presence itself—just that—being there (getting myself out of the way), staying through the discomfort (theirs and mine), providing compassionate silence and stillness. The presence is not me, it is something I bring with me. A goal is that the memory of the moment, held by them perhaps for decades or forever, contains an element of divine peace.
There is a dangerous lack of stillness in our society. Typically, our overburdened minds interfere with our out-of-control emotions which interfere with our out-of-touch spirits which dictate a continuous cacophony of reactionary activity both internally and externally. However, we all know stillness deep inside because infants understand it inherently. We spend our entire lives trying to remember what we once knew.
It is because we are so inept at stillness that we are so fascinated by it. The only possible embodiment of ultimate stillness is God, herself. It seems there is a stillness in the center of the universe so incomprehensible that it is unsurvivable.
There is a theory that stillness can be l(earned) by studying stillness. That is the stillness of disengagement . That does not interest me. Whatever stillness I have earned is due to engagement in ferocious interconnection—seeing, hearing, feeling, acknowledging—with all the beauty and hatred in my path. Stillness presides beginning with the precise moment of collision between all that and the reality of love.
When I was a young adult, I seldom danced in public. No one could abide my frenetically energetic self-expression. They were embarrassed by my full-throttled commitment to the uncool. I could not move my body to music without innocently revealing too much of myself.
One person was finally able to recognize the stillness at the source of my wild delirium. She danced with my stillness and everybody else just got the hell out of the way—partly for their safety, partly to try to figure out what the hell was going on, and partly because they could tell there was really something going on. We were spiritually tethered and we were unstoppable. And every crazy moment of our anarchic choreographic spontaneity was born in the perfection of stillness. I married her, of course.
We think we know stuff. We have all this knowledge and all these great theories and we can’t even implement the simplest most basic precepts like majority rule. After thousands of years of studying justice on a planet with overwhelming sustenance and bounty, our Earth is still barely habitable by most humans because of injustice. And it is getting worse.
Until we can be intentionally still–reconciling ourselves with what we knew at birth; until we can understand, acknowledge, appreciate, and act upon the stillness in others–ALL others; until then–knowledge and theory are not going to carry the day. Right and wrong cannot be right without stillness.
Stillness.
It is already inside of us. All of us. Silently waiting to be seized.
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Al Smith