As I sit here with the thread of an unplanned hour unraveling in my hands, I wonder what to do with it. Perhaps I should tend to the many things that need tying up, or spend it mending the few things in need of repair. I could weave it through my favorite part of the woods - I’d simply tie it to my feet and watch it spin off the loom... But I am made whole just the same by simply sitting here with it, holding it, letting it work on me— tracing it back to its source, the weave of all things, the invisible and unknown within me, already tied to it all.
We tend to feel like we need to fill a vacant moment, rather than let it fill us.
What imbues us when we sit with a quiet moment? Well, thoughts if you are anything like me. But when we ask nothing from our experience, no transformation, no life-altering insight, no solutions - we allow ourselves, for just a few minutes, to encounter one of spirituality’s greatest lessons: that we are being lived by universal intelligence itself.
The next time you are graced with an unplanned moment, quietly feel what it’s like to simply be lived. Let go of what could be achieved, or what could fill you, and just notice the way life is not something you do – but something you are.
In fact, nothing needs to be done to be fully absorbed by the most intuitive, essential, and divine aspect of who you are.
Sez, this poem reaches deep. Sitting with it, I see how much my understanding of being—and doing—has changed.
I’ve been on sick leave for 13 months now, and the probability of never returning to work in the classic sense grows by the minute. The moment I stepped back, I fell—like free-falling from a commercial jet at 800 mph, plummeting 37,500 feet in 49 seconds, crashing into stillness. The impact was profound. I was no longer able to do—not because I wouldn’t, but because I couldn’t. My body, my mind, my entire being refused. And so, I learned from the inside out what it meant to just be.
Reading this now, I see how my priorities and definitions have shifted. Sitting in that jet, I was still acting in chronic trauma. I only reached a post-traumatic state about five weeks after stepping back. Until that moment, I was my trauma, living it, breathing it, functioning within it. Nobody—except my therapists—seemed to grasp that. And up until now, I think I unconsciously measured my mental, physical, emotional, and professional capacity against that trauma-induced performance, the very thing that brought me to this point.
My definition of healing has changed. And yet, until this moment, I hadn’t changed my definition of performance. And now, I see it clearly: those old standards no longer apply. They never did. And I never want to return to them.
This realization crystallizes something else—why returning to the German workforce, at least in the traditional sense, is simply not feasible. It’s not sustainable for me. I have already given everything I had. And I refuse to pour myself into anything that does not offer a return on my happiness, my soul, my values. I will no longer comply with a measure of professional worth that depletes rather than nourishes.
And that’s why I find so much of what I seek reflected in spaces like this, in voices like yours, yet so rarely in real life here in Germany. Often, what I encounter instead is disbelief, a lack of understanding, a refusal to see that life is not what we do—but what we are.
Thank you for this.
Thank you Sez … love this for my Monday morning :)