In the quiet hour before dawn, when the world was still and social media feeds had not yet begun their relentless crawl, I sat cross-legged on the floor, hands folded loosely in my lap. The air was cool, the only sound the hum of the refrigerator and the distant click of a neighbor’s door. I tried to breathe, just breathe, counting the inhales and exhales like beads on an invisible string.
But even in this carefully cultivated silence, thoughts crowded in: the insistent pulse of headlines, the aftertaste of last night’s argument, the vague, persistent sense that I was always behind, always one misstep away from disaster. The world, it seemed, was built to poke and prod, to keep me on edge. If I closed my eyes, I could see myself as a single raw nerve, exposed and quivering, waiting for the next sharp stimulus.
Yesterday, I’d snapped at a coworker over a trivial mistake. The shame still sat heavy on my chest. I replayed the moment, not to flagellate myself—though that was a familiar pattern—but to ask: Why? Why the sudden heat, the need to dominate the conversation? What wound had been pressed?
I remembered the morning’s news: another war, another climate catastrophe, another clever algorithm designed to keep me scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Was it any wonder, then, that I was so quick to react? That I lived in a constant state of high alert, searching for threat or conspiracy or, failing that, the next small outrage to sustain the adrenaline rush?
I thought of the systems at play: not some shadowy cabal, but the slow, grinding gears of capitalism, of media, of the attention economy. These things didn’t care about my well-being. They needed me to be raw, to be reactive, to be endlessly available for stimulation. The more I twitched, the more I consumed. The more I consumed, the more I twitched.
But sitting there in the predawn dark, I realized I had a choice. Not a grand, sweeping revolution—just a small, daily act of resistance. I could notice the triggers. I could pause, even briefly, before the next spike of emotion. I could let the feeling rise, crest, and fall without letting it dictate my next move.
I opened my eyes and stretched, feeling the ache in my hips, the soft crack of my spine. Outside, the sky had shifted from black to deep blue. In an hour, the world would begin its daily barrage, but for now, I was still. I was whole. I was more than a raw nerve.
Today, I would try to be a little less reactive. To hold my ground, even as the world tried to pull me off balance. To see, if only for a moment, what it felt like to be the creator of my own calm.
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