How often do you sit in a quiet room, by yourself, before you take the next step? It could be any step: buying bread, heading to the office, opening your laptop to send an email, powering up your gaming console, reading a book, making dinner, taking a nap, calling a friend, writing a blog post, or submitting your vacation plans to your boss.
That step can begin one of two ways: from quiet or from noise. Nowadays, our default is to start from noise. There’s a TV playing in the background or a constant murmur of co-working small talk. We inject music, TED talks, and podcasts right into our ears. Open spaces have turned up the volume on office buzz. How often do we choose our own beginnings? When do we get to set the terms of the next stage without some stream of interference drilling into our consciousness? Whenever we pick quiet.
You can make quiet, you know? Find it. Go for a walk. Sit in an empty room. Close the door. Take off your headphones. Escape the chatter. It is remarkable what two minutes of quiet do for the brain, and how different a new beginning feels when you decide to make it from nothing rather than something – because that’s what you’re doing, you know? All day, you turn nothing into something, but if the intention isn’t clear, it’ll fall right back to ashes.
Protect your moments of setting intentions. Create the space to choose them deliberately. Take off from quiet, and you’ll find a much stronger wind beneath your wings.