I surf.  Well, not literally.  I did try surfing literally once but I was terrible at it (it's harder than it looks).  No, I do a different kind of surfing.  I surf metaphorically, via mindfulness, on waves of existential impermanence.  It's not easy either. 

When I started down the contemplative path, I was seeking that inner "still point" which T.S. Eliot wrote of in his poem Burnt Norton:

"At the still point of the turning world....
Where past and future are gathered.
Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance..."

I was drawn to silent inner stillness.  I saw it as a place of repose.  But as I sat in meditation and watched my in-breaths and out-breaths, I noticed the continuous stream of thoughts running through my head.  I felt my blood pulsing and momentary nerve sensations on my skin.  I heard the sounds of activity outside my room: birds singing, cars humming, leaves rustling in the wind.  What I encountered in my stillness was motion; ever-changing and morphing and arising and ceasing.  The flux and flow of the universe.

When I think of creation--of atoms and molecules and cells and organisms and planets and solar systems and galaxies--I can see that each is not a static entity but rather a manifestation of continuous processes.  Right now, my body is whirring with the activity of trillions of cells as I stand on a rotating planet that is hurtling though space within a system within a system within a system; all inter-related and in motion. 

And then I fill in the blanks that I previously left out from that segment of T.S. Eliot's poem:           

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only dance."

So there is a still point, but that is where the dance is.  Christian mystics called it perichoresis: the divine dance of the Trinity.  "Do not call it fixity," says Eliot.  What the contemplative perceives in stillness is an intimate awareness of riding on the present-moment wave of the constantly changing everything.  “How do I become still?," wrote Lao Tzu, "By flowing with the stream.”  In stillness I become motion, and in the motion I am still.

--DC