The Capacity for Stillness

on solo travel, the need for rest, and feeling full

Last night I ate tiramisu alone in Florence. I was sitting in the back courtyard of a typical Italian hole-in-the-wall restaurant. Green vines covered the walls, string lights dangled from the gazebo above me, people laughed and recounted their days in languages I don’t speak. The lights were yellow and luminous, like fireflies forming a warm cloud.

I ate my dessert slowly. The kind of slow that feels almost radical now. My spoon dove through each layer, every two inches discovering something new. The balance of mascarpone, espresso, and cocoa powder hit my lips simultaneously, each one planting me firmly in the present moment: by myself across the world. In what will be a surprise to no one, I started to cry. Not from sadness, but from gratitude, which can feel surprisingly similar when it arrives without warning. This is what I had been building towards. Not Florence, specifically, but the capacity to sit in it.

People, when I told them I was intentionally travelling solo, didn’t quite know what to make of it. After all, we are supercharged all the time; at work, in our homes, with our aura rings, when we sit in front of the big screen holding our little screens. “Won’t you get bored?” is the question people most often asked. What sounded comforting to me - endless hours with myself, an open calendar to wander, allowing my thoughts to stray - sounded like solitary confinement to others.

In conversations with people about my trip to Italy, I began to realize that the friction wasn’t about whether or not people were “good” at travelling alone, but rather a disparity between the definition of words. What’s stillness to me is confused with emptiness by others. My ability to rest, savour, linger, has a texture and fullness that makes my life overflow with meaning. Nothing about that seems boring to me. On the contrary, I would argue that we are all overstimulated and existentially bored all the time.

The distinction between boredom and stillness was arrived at long before me, by Soren Kierkegaard. In Either/Or, his first published work, Kierkegaard explores the concept of boredom as human crisis. Boredom, or the emptiness we feel when we are bored, arises due to our inability to engage with ourselves. Boredom, therefore, becomes a lack of meaning rather than an absence of stimulation. In an attempt to rectify that hollow feeling, we become compulsively busy.

Kierkegaard explains this busyness through the analogy of crop rotation. In this metaphor, we are constantly “changing the soil,” our foundation. He puts it plainly:

“This rotation of crops is the vulgar, inartistic rotation and is based on an illusion. One is weary of living in the country and moves to the city; one is weary of one’s native land and goes abroad; one is [weary of Europe] and goes to America etc.; one indulges in the fanatical hope of an endless journey from star to star. Or there is another direction, but still extensive. One is weary of eating on porcelain and eats on silver; wearying of that, one eats on gold; one burns down half of Rome in order to visualize the Trojan conflagration. This method cancels itself and is the spurious infinity.”

For us, the destination has changed, but the weariness Kierkegaard emphasizes remains. Instead of rotating crops we jump ship, frustrated that we aren’t losing weight, or getting faster, or getting our first pull-up quick enough. What passes for productivity strikes me as an inability to be still, to relish in the slowness of process and render it meaningful. We don’t burn down Rome anymore, we cancel our gym memberships.

The inability to rest and the inability to commit are, I think, the same crisis Kierkegaard was describing: a boredom so deep it can’t sit still. One is compulsively doing, the other is compulsively changing. And the catch is if we do want to make any meaningful, healthy change in our life, we are going to have to do things even when we don’t feel like it. The problem arises when the effort becomes compulsive rather than chosen; when we can’t take a rest day without feeling guilty, when we can’t sit still without reaching for our phones, when we can no longer tell the difference between discipline and avoidance. So when I tell people I am travelling alone for two weeks, with endless unplanned solitary hours ahead of me, they don’t know what to make of it.

I ran in Florence anyway. I wasn’t running out of compulsion, or even as part of training for my ultra-marathon in May, really, but because running in an unfamiliar city is its own form of stillness. Sinking deeper into the soil instead of changing it. I circled the Duomo, I made my way across the Ponte Vecchio, and I ran alongside the Arno river all the way until I reached the end of the sidewalk. I thought nothing about my pace, or even how long I was going for, but propelled solely on feel. I took in each of the neighbourhoods I otherwise wouldn’t have seen, and sank into the history that existed hundreds of years before me.

The fitness industry, for all its enthusiasm, has a vested interest in your restlessness. The same restlessness that bristles at the thought of solo travel shows up in the gym as program hopping, metric chasing, or the inability to consistently just do the boring basics over time. Fitness culture sells the crop rotation; new year, new supplements, new gadgets, new standards. It profits from your ennui.

There is not much a person - whether a mom of three, a young adult who just got their first big promotion, or a self-employed 36-year-old woman - can do to change the course of the tsunami of modern life, the constraints that make idle time ephemeral. I have found myself wondering if we’d all be better off just giving into nihilism. Then I am gifted with an endless moment, and I’m reminded of how grounding it feels to savour it. It doesn’t have to be travelling solo; I don’t take that luxury lightly. But being a mindful presence in your own life comes at no cost: claiming your core values, understanding how you want to feel in your body, finding joy in process over outcome. The true remedy against boredom is to stop being a passive observer and start creating meaning through deliberate choice.

At a remote spa in the Tuscan countryside, the only sounds I heard were roosters crowing. Not a stretch of road long enough for me to run. Too quaint to have a gym. I sat, alone, in a baroque steam room with nowhere to be, and as each bead of sweat dripped off me onto the iridescent tile, I understood, again, how full I can feel sitting solitary in an empty room. When I arrive home, I trust that I’ll just pick up where I left off in my training. I’ll run the same routes and follow my lifting program. Nothing lost, really, but everything gained.