Silence as Return
Silence as Return
Practice, Not Theory
I want to talk about practice. Not theory, not philosophy, not another idea to add to your collection. Something you can actually do. Tonight, if you want. Tomorrow morning if tonight doesn’t work.
For years I collected concepts like currency. Enlightenment, transcendence, awakening, presence, consciousness, being. Words that pointed at something I could sense but not touch. Books stacked on shelves. Conversations that circled the same territory without landing.
The ideas were right, but they were inert.
When the Mind Fights Back
Then I started sitting in silence. I wasn’t doing a technique. I was sitting. No mantras, no visualizations, no counting breaths or scanning body parts. Just sitting. Being quiet. Stopping.
Five minutes at first. That’s all I could manage. My mind fought it like it was losing a job. Thoughts crashed into each other, competing for attention. Memories surfaced, random and urgent. Plans formed and dissolved.
The narrator didn’t shut up. It never does. It just changes masks.
I kept at it. Not through discipline exactly. I don’t have much of that. Through curiosity. I wanted to know what was underneath the noise. What was there when the thoughts paused. What would happen if I just waited.
What Silence Reveals
After a few weeks, the grip loosened. The thoughts still came, but they stopped demanding engagement. They arose and passed like weather. Like clouds moving across a sky that didn’t need to do anything about them.
Behind them, or beneath them, there was space.
The space wasn’t empty. It was unargued reality. Presence, maybe. Or simply being without the commentary track. Existence without the narrator explaining what existence meant.
How Time Changes
Here’s what I noticed that matters for this series on time. When I sat in that silence, the sense of time changed. Five minutes felt like five minutes, not like waiting for five minutes to end.
I’d check the timer and feel surprised. Not because time was slow, but because I wasn’t negotiating with it.
The subtle tension of wanting to be somewhere else, some other moment, relaxed. There was just this moment, and it was enough. Not because anything special was happening, but because nothing needed to happen.
Carrying Silence Into Daily Life
And then, gradually, that quality started bleeding into regular life. Walking somewhere. Washing dishes. Waiting in line. Moments would open up where the mental noise paused, and there was just the action, just the situation, just existence without the constant commentary about what came before and what comes next.
The uniform time, the calendar time, the clock time with its pressing deadlines and accumulating hours, it lost some of its weight.
Clock time lost its authority.
Not because I ignored responsibilities. I still show up when I need to show up. I still meet deadlines that matter. But the time those deadlines measured stopped feeling like the only time. It started feeling like a convention, an agreement, a useful fiction for coordinating with other people. Not the fabric of reality.
The silence revealed something older underneath. Cyclical time. Body time. Breath time. The kind many traditional cultures organized life around, before industrial scheduling swallowed everything. A time that breathed rather than ticked.
The Practice: Five Minutes
I’m not special. I don’t have access to anything that isn’t available to anyone willing to sit still and face the noise. This isn’t reserved for monks on mountains or seekers with decades of practice. It’s available right now, in your room, wherever you’re reading this.
Here’s the practice. It’s simple, which doesn’t mean easy.
Tonight, before you sleep, sit somewhere comfortable. Not lying down, you’ll fall asleep. Just sitting. Close your eyes. Don’t try to empty your mind. That’s not the point and it doesn’t work anyway.
Just stop engaging with what arises.
Thoughts will come. Let them be thoughts. Feelings will surface. Let them be feelings. Don’t push anything away, don’t hold anything close. Just wait.
Set a timer if you need to. Five minutes. That’s enough to start. Not to achieve anything. Not to get somewhere. Just to practice not going anywhere.
What to Expect Over Weeks
Give it a few weeks. Long enough that silence stops feeling exotic. The number doesn’t matter. What matters is returning to it. Not perfectly, not every single night, but enough that it becomes a possibility you reach for rather than an idea you read about.
The silence you’ll find isn’t absence. It’s presence. The kind that’s always been there, underneath the constructed world, underneath calendars and clocks and deadlines and boxes. The kind that doesn’t track minutes because it doesn’t need to.
Call it what you want. Names are more noise.
What matters is the finding. The moment you realize the noise was never all there was. When you touch something still beneath the motion. When you come home to a place you didn’t know you’d left.
It outlives your schedule.
You don’t have to go anywhere to find it.
You just have to stop going.
This is the sixth essay in a series exploring our relationship with time, perception, and the structures we’ve inherited without questioning. Next: the difference between the constructed world and what flows through it.