Image from author.
She sat across from me in the radiation oncology exam room, hands folded in her lap.
No phone.
No watch.
No distractions.
Just her presence — so quiet, it filled the room.
She had metastatic cancer, but that wasn’t what she came to talk about.
“I spent my whole life moving,” she said. “Rushing, fixing, solving. Even when I sat still, my mind didn’t stop. But cancer… cancer taught me something else.”
“It taught me how to be still.”
She didn’t say it with resignation. It felt like a victory.
Most people come into the clinic with questions about what to do.
They want a treatment plan, a supplement list, a way forward.
She came in with something simpler, and somehow, deeper — a way to be.
“I used to think stillness was laziness,” she told me.
“But now I think it’s wisdom. Sitting in the garden with my tea, letting my dog nap beside me.”
No music.
No news.
Just being there.
“That,” she said, “was the first time I really lived.”
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She wasn’t being poetic.
She was just telling the truth.
Stillness is a challenging concept to sell in our culture.
We equate motion with progress.
We blur productivity and purpose.
We fill every space with noise.
But healing, aging, grieving, and loving — all require stillness.
I’ve seen patients search for answers in pills, scans, and data.
But sometimes the answer comes in silence.
A deep breath.
A quiet morning.
A patient who learned to stop chasing life long enough actually to feel it.
She asked me no questions.
She just said thank you.
And as she left, I realized I was the one who’d been given something.
I’ve met thousands of patients.
But the ones who stay with me are rarely the ones who fought the hardest or read the most studies.
They’re the ones who discovered a truth we forget in our rush: That stillness isn’t the opposite of life.
It’s the quiet space where life shows up.
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