The Art of Staying Still

I spent twenty minutes at the bus stop this morning, just watching the crowd. Everyone was checking their phones, shifting their weight, or looking down the street as if they could pull the bus toward them by sheer force of will. I found myself doing the same, tapping my foot against the pavement. We are so afraid of standing still. We treat waiting like a chore, a gap in our day that needs to be filled with noise or movement. But there is a different kind of waiting—the kind where you stop trying to rush the clock and simply exist in the space you occupy. It is a quiet, heavy sort of patience. It doesn’t ask for anything to happen right away. It just sits with the reality of the moment, breathing in the dust and the heat, finding a strange, steady rhythm in the pause. I wonder if we would be less anxious if we learned to stop treating our lives like a series of transit points.

Shahnaz Parvin has captured this exact feeling of endurance in her beautiful image titled Waiting. It reminds me that there is a quiet dignity in simply being present, even when the world feels like it is standing still. What does waiting feel like to you?