Something I Stopped Doing (and How It Felt)
"I've stopped treating silence like a problem to be solved."
It started on a Tuesday, which somehow feels important. Not a Monday, when you're still full of fresh intentions and the week feels possible. A Tuesday, when everything has already settled into its shape and there's nothing particularly dramatic going on.
I'd gone for my usual walk. Earbuds in, episode queued, the same podcast I'd been half-listening to for a week. Except my phone was at 4% and I hadn't thought to charge it, so I had roughly three minutes of audio before the whole thing died on me. I remember thinking: fine. Twenty-five minutes without a podcast. How bad could it be?
Worse than expected, honestly. The first ten minutes were genuinely strange. I noticed, for the first time in a while, how much I'd been using sound as a kind of armour. Fill the silence, stay occupied, never just be somewhere without consuming something. It felt almost odd to simply walk with nothing in my ears. Like I'd forgotten how to be in a place without also producing something from it.
But then something shifted. I noticed the neighbours had planted new roses. I worked out a problem I'd been circling for days, not by thinking hard at it, but by not thinking about anything at all. By the time I got home, I felt oddly rested in a way I hadn't expected from a route I'd walked a hundred times before.
I've left the earbuds at home for most walks since then. Not all of them. Some days I genuinely want the company of a story or a voice I trust. But I've stopped treating silence as a problem to be solved. Stopped assuming that every idle minute needs to earn its keep.
It felt uncomfortable at first. Then a little sad, honestly, that I'd been walking around my own neighbourhood for months and barely noticing it. And then, slowly, something like relief.
Have you stopped something lately that surprised you with how it felt?
Warmly, Evelyn
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