The Gift of Stillness (a short story)
Lena had always been on the move. From the moment her alarm clock blared in the early morning to the last flicker of the television screen at night, her life was a relentless series of tasks. Emails to answer, calls to make, errands to run. She thrived on the constant motion — the hum of productivity that kept her mind distracted from the quiet corners of her soul. If she stayed busy enough, she could ignore the low hum of unease that crept in when the noise finally faded.
But on that January morning, everything changed.
The sun had barely risen, casting a pale light over the city as Lena bundled up in her coat and scarf. The wind bit sharply at her face, the kind of cold that numbed your skin and left your thoughts frozen in place. She welcomed it. The chill seemed to match her mood — brisk, distant, and untouchable. After a long week of work, a day off stretched before her like an unsolved puzzle. No plans, no agenda — just an overwhelming feeling that something was missing, something she couldn’t quite name.
She ended up at the coffee shop, the one a few blocks from her apartment. It was usually a quick stop for a caffeine fix between meetings, a place teeming with hurried customers and business chatter. But today, something was different. As she stepped into the ordering queue, the air itself seemed to hold its breath, as if the world was pausing for her to notice.
She found a table outside. The surface was dusted with a thin layer of snow, and though it was cold, Lena didn’t mind. She sat, unsure of what to do with the stillness surrounding her.
At first, it felt unnatural. Her fingers drummed on the sides of her coffee cup, her feet shifted restlessly under the table. Her mind spun in a thousand directions. She could be running errands. She should be finishing that report. There were so many things she should be doing. She looked around. The shop was eerily quiet, save for the soft grind of coffee beans and the occasional murmur of a barista calling out an order. It was a silence that felt foreign, almost too heavy, like a blanket she couldn’t quite bear.
Her chest tightened, as though her body was rebelling against the stillness, demanding action. But then, in the quiet, Lena felt a strange pull — a gentle invitation, like the world was whispering, slow down. Her breath slowed, too. She took a long inhale, and for the first time in days, she let it out slowly, as though she were releasing a weight she didn’t know she was carrying.
As she watched the snowflakes drift from the sky, each one delicate and fleeting, something began to shift inside her. It wasn’t just the stillness of the world around her — it was the stillness within her. She had spent so many years running from moments like this, thinking that silence meant emptiness, that peace was a luxury she couldn’t afford. She had convinced herself that if she just kept moving, kept filling her time, the discomfort would dissipate. But now, as she sat in the quiet, she felt something new. A kind of recognition.
The stillness wasn’t empty. It was full. Full of everything she had been avoiding. The feelings she buried under deadlines and distractions. The dreams she ignored because they felt too far out of reach. The yearning for connection, for being instead of doing. And perhaps, most confronting of all, the realization that the peace she had thought would suffocate her was actually the very thing she needed most.
Lena closed her eyes, allowing herself to simply be — without the weight of expectations or the pull of “what’s next.” She allowed the snow to fall without urgency, the quiet to fill her mind without judgment. For once, there were no deadlines, no checklists, no demands. Just the rhythm of her breath and the soft falling of snowflakes, each one a small invitation to stay present, to be kind to herself, to slow down.
When she opened her eyes again, she felt lighter. The tension in her shoulders had melted away. The constant pressure to be everywhere, do everything had faded into the background, as though the stillness had gently peeled away the layers of stress and anxiety. For the first time in a long while, she didn’t feel the need to escape. She didn’t need to fill the quiet with noise or hurry back to a schedule. She had been given something more valuable: permission to rest. Permission to simply exist.
Lena smiled softly, feeling the weight of the cold air on her face, the gentle falling of snow that felt like a gift, urging her to stop running — if only for a while. The coffee shop, the world, and even herself were exactly as they needed to be in this moment. And as she stood to leave, the realization settled in her chest like the first breath after a long, deep sleep.
She didn’t need to keep running. The answers she had been searching for weren’t hidden in the next task, the next meeting, or the next deadline. They were already here, waiting for her to embrace the stillness. Sometimes, the greatest discovery isn’t in what we do, but in what we choose to be.
Isaiah 30:15 (New International Version)
“This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel, says: ‘In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength.’”
