Turning Movement into Stillness

 When I am hearing the story of my colleague's retreat, I am sometimes lead to wonder: does anything ever really happen on retreat? Or is it really simply turning movement into stillness? I thought about how common it is for practitioners to report on how even the sense of time is lost during the longer retreats.  But sometimes there is a teachable moment there, in the sense that one is realizing that there is already an inherent stillness in everything.
   When we converse with people or even read the news, do we look at the underlying stillness, or do we look at the movement? To answer that question, I need only reflect on the word "news". "News" entails something that is emerging, that is completely novel, and is also completely original. An air of anticipation happens when we hear the words "breaking news", because the term entails a kind of rupturing of a predictable routine: "We interrupt our regular programming to deliver this breaking..".. and of course, "novels" and "news" are probably the two most popular genres of reading on longer commutes, where they both entail original, up and coming information. The point I am making is, one would hardly pay so much attention to breaking news if it were known or understood ahead of time that the news contains similar patterns of human interaction that cycle. Today's "gossip" may seem completely new, but somehow our familiarity with it tells us that it speaks of something universal and deep within the human psyche, such as a struggle to be known or recognized. However nobody wants to admit that our "news" stories are really old ones, because doing so takes the fun out of reading the news or watching it on one's preferred feed. This tells me that people often prefer seeing movement rather than looking for the stillness in things.
   The practice of turning movement into stillness in terms of reading news might be....to look for the silent universals in the news. Most stories revolve around similar issues: fear, trust/mistrust, camaraderie, betrayal, loss, success and separation. And they are simply rehashed in ways that make it appear as though they are being discovered for the first time, or as though the person affected by them was somehow not supposed to be affected. The "sullying" of a pure person is one such example of a trope one often finds in news, where scandals hit people who were otherwise considered "pure" as snow or good all around. But perhaps the sullying aspect is the switch from a universal given to an unexpected twist: I recognize that the eternal I once assumed in someone is really constant change, and the change I assumed excited me about someone is only a changing constant.