The Long Unwinding: In the Stillpoint (Part 3)

Trusting the space where nothing yet makes sense

This is Part 3 of The Long Unwinding, a series exploring how we navigate profound change, both individually and collectively. Each piece follows a different phase in the slow, nonlinear arc of personal and cultural transformation.

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There is a moment in the unwinding process when the tide goes quiet. It stops moving backwards and forwards. It’s just still. It’s the part no one likes to talk about. The part that doesn’t look like healing or transformation.

You don’t feel like celebrating here. You might feel foggy. Heavy. Untethered. Your energy goes inward. Your mind starts to question everything. Why am I so tired? Why can’t I get clarity? Why does nothing feel right?

Our culture doesn’t make space for this pause. We’re trained to override it…to call it weakness, laziness, or failure. We’re taught to push our way through, to take action before we've actually arrived. But in the deeper rhythms of the body—and the body of the world—this stillness is not the absence of movement. It is the gathering of resources. It’s in the pause between breaths. It’s the intelligence beneath perception—the part of you that knows without needing to explain.

This is not an empty space. It only seems that way because we’re not used to listening.

The stillpoint is not an interruption in the unwinding.
It is the unwinding.

The unwinding isn’t always visible. It’s not always a letting go or a breakthrough. Sometimes, it’s the body no longer gripping the old pattern. Sometimes, it’s the moment of doing nothing, where everything begins to reorganize beneath the surface. That’s the stillpoint. It doesn’t mark the end of the process. It is the process, in its most surrendered form.

This is the phase where the old has fallen away, but the new hasn’t yet formed. Where all that’s left is presence, if we’re willing to meet it. Not performance. Not productivity. Just presence. Just the slow, soft pulse of something waiting to be known.

It’s often tempting to skip this part. We want to fix the discomfort. Understand it. Explain it. Rush it into meaning. But that’s not what this moment is for. This moment is asking for trust. Not blind faith, but more of a cellular trust, rooted in the body’s knowing that life reorganizes in the pause. That silence is part of the cycle. That rest is not a total giving up or a withdrawal. The pause is where direction is catalyzed.

So if you find yourself here, in the quiet space between tides, the invitation is to let yourself feel it. Let yourself linger. Let the system settle. This is the part of the long unwinding where your only task is to stay.

To not force.
To not know.
To let the stillness just be.

This goes against almost everything we've been taught.

We were raised inside systems that measure value in output, certainty in speed, and identity in constant becoming. We learned to move faster than our own knowing, to produce before we’re ready, to label the fog as failure rather than invitation.

Stillness makes those systems nervous. It interrupts the momentum. It doesn’t perform, and it doesn’t reassure.

But it listens. And in a culture addicted to noise, that is no small thing.

We don’t often realize how deeply this conditioning lives in us. How even rest becomes something we try to earn. How even healing becomes a task to complete. How easily we internalize the idea that presence must be justified.

But the body doesn’t play by those rules. It will slow when it needs to. It will pause without explanation. It will ask you to feel things you’ve spent a lifetime avoiding—to return you to yourself.

And maybe that’s the quiet revolution we’re in now.
Not the collapse of a system.
But the return of a rhythm.

So pause.
Let the tide be still.
Let the system breathe.
You are not lost.
You are arriving.

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This essay is Part 3 of a series, The Long Unwinding. If you missed them, you can read Part 1 and Part 2.

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