In stillness the energy of focus gathers, and brings us home to the present.
These days it seems even a single task arrives with an entourage. There was a time when things were different, at least, for many people. Now it seems we are preoccupied with multiple things at the same time. Which makes it impossible to give complete attention to anything at one time. We seem to be everywhere at once and nowhere completely. The inability to focus has become one of the primary problems of modern life.
In such moments the most crucial things—our relationships with ourselves and others begin to erode. Divided attention produces an incomplete experience, just as a divided mind creates its own waste.
The term garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) was popularized in the 1960s. Though it was originally applied to computer programming, its principle is no less true when applied to the human mind. It is not mere coincidence that so many live beneath their own desire for peace and well-being. Every living system, in some measure, responds to what nourishes it.
How eagerly we often seek to escape the present moment, to avoid our own company, without realizing what we are being distracted from. We may even feel guilty about withdrawing for moments of solitude, as though time alone were somehow a rejection of those we love. Solitude has a peculiar way of restoring gratitude for the things we often overlooked.
The nineteenth century writer Kahlil Gibran captures something of this in The Prophet, when he writes:
But let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Time alone is not a rejection of others but a return to oneself—a preparation and refinement that makes one a better friend, lover, parent, and person. To be comfortable with solitude, to enjoy one’s own presence is to discover a companion that transcends circumstances. What occupies the mind will inevitably shape a life.
Focusing on one thing at a time may be the simplest solution to a fractious life.
Yet mushin begs something even more subtle: What if peace is not merely a matter of replacing one thought with a better one?
What if beneath all thought there exists a mind that does not require thinking?
Mushin is stillness; it is empty like a bellows. But within its emptiness there is capacity—so too is he that can rest in solitude. We often admire the intense focus of an athlete or artist who performs with such poise and rhythm that they seem to merge so completely with their instrument that neither appears to exist—only the outcome they produce.
These are the moments of life we surrender when attention is divided—that seamless transition from one moment to another, one movement to another, without resistance, possession, or anticipation. A lifetime in a single moment.
There is space between every breath.
Within all sound there is silence; for silence is not the absence of sound, it is its birthplace.
As darkness gives birth to light, and stillness animates every motion, so calm is found in the midst of chaos, and peace is not something imposed upon the universe but rather, something discovered within its natural order.
The mind becomes still not by straining to eliminate every rising thought, but when it no longer attaches to every one that does.
And perhaps this is where mushin begins:
to move without letting go of stillness,
to think without identifying as thought,
to act without division
to enter each moment so completely that no one is left observing.
by K. Osei