You Can’t Always Be Firing On All Cylinders
If there were one thing I would add to this repository of ideas, it would be the admonition to take time for silence and reflection. Not as a buddhist monk or a trendy Californian, but as someone who opts out of mandatory noise contribution.
Life moves in peaks and valleys. Inspirations and executions. Inhales and exhales. Build ups and tear downs.
No one is always innovating. No one is always deconstructing. At some point, you flow to the next part of the wave. It’s effortless, even when it requires extensive effort.
What am I saying? You need at some point to shut your mouth. Close your laptop. Power down your phone. Take a breath.
No one fires on all cylinders all the time. Yet that’s exactly what our modern age prescribes.
You won’t always have good ideas. You won’t always have solutions. You won’t always have a deep and meaningful insight to share. Sometimes you’re just spent. Be spent. Just be. Allow it to happen. Because it will.
Go to bed knowing that another day will come with another idea. It may not be tomorrow, but it will come. It’s only a matter of time.
Today, it’s enough to have paused to rest. To wait. And keep waiting.
Totally agree with this…
I feel like that kind of silence and reflection has only been a real luxury in a few parts of my life. Most of my adult life, certainly since 26, has felt like some version of fight or flight. Work, kids, grief, pressure, trying to hold things together, trying to build something before the window closes. I’m getting better… but it has taken a long time to even recognize that.
And sometimes the people around me pay for what I haven’t learned how to quiet yet. I can admit that. Not because I don’t love them, but because I’m carrying too much speed, too much urgency, too much old survival in my nervous system.
That truth, for me most days, is a hard pill to swallow. Age waits on no one.
But the longer I live, the more I believe it’s love that matters most. Not performance. Not always having the answer. Not firing on all cylinders.
So yes, rest matters. Silence matters. Pausing matters. I’m learning that being spent is not failure - sometimes it’s just the body and soul finally telling the truth.