The idea hit me on the mat.
I’d just gotten back from martial arts class, still in that post-training haze where your body’s loose and your mind is somehow both at peace and loud at the same time. It’s usually during this time a lot of ideas come my way. I was stretching, working the tightness out of my hips, and an idea for a piece landed — forming into something ready to take shape, the way they often do. My first instinct wasn’t to sit with it. It was to reach for my phone. Open notes. Log it. Be productive. Don’t lose the thread.
And I caught myself mid-reach.
Because that instinct — the one that told me to document this now before it disappears — was actually the thing standing between me and the reason the idea was even able to show up in the first place. I wasn’t stretching to prep for my next task. I was stretching to come down. To let my nervous system settle after an hour of controlled physicality. That quiet, unassuming fifteen minutes on the mat was doing something for me that no amount of “staying productive” could replace. And I was about to trade it for a notes app.
That’s the part that stuck with me. Not that I almost missed logging an idea, but that my default setting, even in a moment built for stillness, was to fill it. Not because I needed to. Because sitting in the quiet without a task attached to it felt, for a second, like a missed opportunity to make the most of the moment.
We have to undo the conditioning of what we see today as the norm. The tendency to always fill in the gap has a real cost. Catching yourself in moments like this and choosing to commit to being in the moment isn’t wasted time. It might be the least wasted time we all have.
Now, we’ve all heard this before — “it’s good to unplug,” we tell our kids, “it’s quiet time.” These are phrases everyone’s already heard but nobody really takes in. Too often we dismiss something because it seems simple.
Training in martial arts has taught me a valuable new perspective on things like this. Simple things appear simple, but are only as simple as you want them to be. Let me explain. If you ask anyone to throw a jab — a punch — everyone can do it, right? Yes — but although it’s easy to throw one, throwing one properly, with good body mechanics, is not easy to do.
There is no one right way, but there are several wrong ways — and understanding the depth of something seemingly simple will make you better in and of itself. Anyone can sit in silence — that’s easy, everyone’s done it by accident waiting in line somewhere. But sitting in silence thoughtfully — actually being present in it instead of just enduring it until the next distraction — that’s the “good body mechanics” of stillness.
Sharing this with you is not a fitness hack or gimmick — simply a new lens for you to see the same “simple” object from, and why we need to see them with a fresh pair of eyes.
What was it that I was really trading in that moment earlier stretching on the mat? It wasn’t productivity. Let’s keep going.
It’s about getting older.
Everyone in their twenties and thirties doesn’t really have much to worry about in the broader sense. You’re blind to a lot of things because until then you didn’t need to see it. Somewhere in the last few years of my thirties, I started carrying a low-grade fear I didn’t have before. You start having soreness out of nowhere. You notice old classmates from high school looking different, and these things can’t help but alarm you — not a fear of dying, per se, but of losing pieces of myself before I’m ready to accept it.
At some point, it’s things like not being able to move the way I move now. Or not being able to keep up with my daughter, to have her see me still play with her and move at a high level. It’s that — and underneath all of it, the one that hits home the most — losing the ability to remember the people I love. The thought of watching my own mind start to erase itself while my body’s still standing there is a healthy fear we should all carry, and one that should push us toward doing the little things that help our minds stay healthy as we get older.
Age comes for us all. No surprise to anyone. What might be a surprise is how much the little things we do with the quiet moments we have every day — can actually make a difference. We actually do have some say and influence in whether we age with dignity, or age having quietly rolled the dice — letting moments of self-reflection be cast aside because there was always something “better” I told myself I should be doing. This is where we have to reframe the thinking. We have to assign value to it.
Most of us might think this only applies physically, but I’m realizing there’s a mental version of stretching. A mental version of mobility work. Something that keeps the machinery from seizing up — like my lower back from sitting too much! (We’re all guilty.)
I was listening to a podcast recently — nothing dramatic, just background noise for a drive — about the brain’s lymphatic system. How the brain, like the rest of the body, has its own drainage process, its own way of clearing out waste. And I kept going with that thought pattern. What if stillness — real stillness, the kind without a screen or a task invading that space — does something similar for the mind?
Not physically flushing anything, I’m not claiming there’s a lot of scientific proof on this. But if simply letting your thoughts move without direction, without a goal attached, is its own kind of flow — its own kind of clearing — then every time we deny ourselves that in favor of staying “productive,” we might be skipping the exact maintenance that keeps the mind sharp longer. Even if the difference is small. Even if it only moves the odds a little. A little over time is a lot, when the alternative is losing a piece of who you are.
The more I think about it, the more it makes sense and mirrors the same reasoning as how the lymphatic system acts as the vehicle for moving immune cells throughout the body to fight infection and mount immune responses. Simultaneously, it removes damaged cells, cancer cells, and pathogens from tissues by filtering them out of the interstitial fluid (lymph) and transporting them to lymph nodes for destruction or removal. Like the tide coming in on the beach and washing away the sand and pulling things back in with it.
Most of us didn’t grow up being taught this. Some of us grew up in houses where stillness meant you were just bored and didn’t know what to do — where quiet was the space right before someone got in trouble, not a space to breathe in and be present in. If that’s you, filling every gap with noise isn’t a character flaw. It’s just the only operating system anyone ever knew, especially people born in the 2000s and afterwards. That’s not something you fix by reading a paragraph about it. But it is something you may start to notice now.
I noticed it on a yoga mat, and I’m glad I listened, because moments like that are a win-win — and that’s how you need to tell yourself to think about it moving forward. You’ll never look back and call it wasted time once you understand the potential benefits it can have for you now and in the future. It’s in those moments when all these ideas do come and present themselves to you.
It’s why people joke about “touching grass” — because it’s real. Or having writer’s block. So take this for whatever part of it applies to you, and you’ll feel better for it. The missed opportunities you think may happen will work themselves out, if they were really meant to happen. I leave you with some thoughts by an old friend and neighbor to so many of us.
“It’s about the white spaces between the paragraphs that are more important than any of the text. Because it allows you to think about what’s been said.”
“Our society is much more interested in information than wonder, in noise rather than silence… And I feel that we need a lot more wonder and a lot more silence in our lives. How do we encourage reflection?”