Latest / She Survived: Stories of Courage, Recovery & Reinvention / Standing Still When Everyone Runs: The Quiet Power of Pausing | She Survived
Transcript
- I want you to close your eyes for just a second and picture the last time you felt like you were drowning in motion. Not swimming, not treading water, but being pulled under by a current that doesn’t care how tired you are. We live in a culture that has mistaken speed for progress. If you aren’t moving, you’re falling behind. If you aren’t producing, you’re worthless. It’s a loud, frantic rhythm that beats in our chests, telling us that stillness is synonymous with failure. But I’m here to tell you, from the quiet corner of my own garden where I’ve spent decades pulling weeds and watching things grow at their own stubborn pace, that this belief is a lie. A beautiful, terrifying lie. We’ve been taught that survival looks like running. That we have to outrun our pasts, outrun our debts, outrun the expectations of people who don’t even know us. But what happens when your legs give out? What happens when the engine simply quits? Most of us panic. We feel shame. We think there must be something wrong with us, some defect in our wiring, that prevents us from keeping up with the herd. But I want to invite you into a different possibility today. Maybe the defect isn’t in you. Maybe the defect is in the idea that you were ever meant to run on a track laid out by someone else. Let’s talk about that feeling in your shoulders. You know the one. It’s that tight knot between your neck and your ear, the place where anxiety likes to set up camp. It’s there because you are holding yourself upright against a force that wants to knock you down. For years, I thought my job was to hold myself up. To be strong. To be the rock. But rocks get eroded. They crack under pressure. I remember a season in my life, right after everything collapsed, when I tried to keep moving. I had to. There were bills, there was grief, there was the sheer momentum of habit. I kept running, even though I was broken. And one day, I just… stopped. I sat on the floor of my kitchen, surrounded by unpacked boxes, and I couldn’t take another step. I didn’t choose to stop. My body chose it for me. And in that moment, I expected judgment. I expected God, or the universe, or my mother’s voice to say, 'Get up. Get going.' Instead, there was silence. And in that silence, I realized that standing still wasn’t giving up. It was the only honest thing I could do. It was an act of radical honesty. Admitting that I couldn’t run anymore. Think about that word. Rebellion. Usually, we think of rebellion as shouting, as marching, as making noise. But sometimes, the most rebellious thing you can do in a world obsessed with productivity is to simply sit down. To breathe. To exist without achieving anything. This isn’t about laziness. Don’t let anyone confuse rest with surrender. There is a difference between collapsing and choosing to pause. Collapsing is when the structure fails. Choosing to pause is when you look at the structure and decide it needs a foundation check. In recent episodes, we talked about walking away from disrespect. That was an action. It was a movement. But this? This is internal. This is the courage to stay put when every fiber of your social conditioning screams at you to move forward. To send the email. To answer the text. To fix the problem. Sometimes, the bravest thing you can do is refuse to participate in the frenzy. It feels dangerous. It feels like you’re slipping off the edge of the world. But if you stay there, long enough, you’ll find that the ground beneath you is solid. It has been solid all along. You were just too dizzy to see it. I tend a garden. It’s messy. It’s imperfect. Some days I dig holes, and other days I just watch. I learned early on that plants don’t respond to urgency. If I yell at a tomato plant to grow faster, it doesn’t work. It actually stresses out. It wilts. Growth requires darkness. It requires silence. It requires a period of dormancy where nothing seems to be happening above ground, while below, roots are reaching deep, anchoring themselves against the storm. We are no different. When you stand still, you are rooting. You are gathering energy. You are processing trauma, or joy, or confusion, at a cellular level. Society calls this stagnation. I call it composting. It’s where the magic happens. It’s where the rot turns into richness. So if you are in a season where you can’t run, where you can barely walk, please hear me: you are not broken. You are composting. You are building the soil for whatever comes next. And that takes time. It takes patience. It takes a fierce, quiet trust that the seasons will turn, even if you don’t control them. I know how hard it is to give yourself permission. We’ve been trained to measure our worth by our output. By how many tasks we check off, how many emails we clear, how many problems we solve. When we stop, we feel guilty. We feel like we’re letting people down. But let me ask you this: who are you letting down by taking a breath? Is it your boss? Your partner? Your children? Or is it yourself? Because when you run until you drop, you bring nothing but exhaustion to the table. You bring resentment. You bring burnout. Standing still allows you to show up as a whole person, not a fragmented machine. It allows you to listen. Really listen. To your body, to your intuition, to the people around you. I remember a friend who burned out completely. She spent months doing nothing. Just sitting. Reading. Walking slowly. People whispered she was wasting her life. But when she finally started working again, she was sharper. Kinder. More creative. She hadn’t wasted time; she had recovered her soul. She had remembered who she was before the hustle consumed her. And that version of her was worth waiting for. So how do we start? How do we learn to stand still when the world is spinning? It starts with tiny moments. One minute. Two minutes. You don’t need to quit your job or move to a cabin in the woods. You just need to create a pocket of stillness. Sit in your car before you go inside. Stand by the window and watch the clouds. Put your phone down and just feel your feet on the floor. These small acts of pausing are like anchors. They remind you that you are here, now, alive. They break the spell of the rush. And over time, these small pauses accumulate. They build a reservoir of peace. A muscle of presence. The turning point was tiny for me. It was a single cup of tea, drunk without looking at my phone. Just the warmth of the mug in my hands. The steam rising. The taste of the leaf. In that minute, I was not a victim of my circumstances. I was just a woman drinking tea. And that was enough. It was more than enough. It was everything. Breathe into it. Let your shoulders drop. You don’t have to run today. You just have to be here. I’m Gloria Henry, and I’m so glad you’re resting with me. Until next time, tend your garden.