'On Stillness' by Georg Haslam (they/them)

There is a beauty to a place that is still, where nothing else need exist. I found such place. I sat on the stones and on the grass, turned a yellowish hue by months of drought. All I could hear was the waves crashing on the cliffs. No email notifications. No phone calls. No short-form videos. Looking out across the sea on a misty day, I imagined for a moment that this was all that there is. It got me thinking about quiet and stillness in a mind that is never settled, what it means to find silence as someone who is mentally ill.

There I was human. I was not an exam grade, nor a digital consumer. I was not defined by a diagnosis, nor by my darkest moments. I was just a person, sitting on a rock, staring out to sea. It reminds me, in a world that is so hectic, where time feels so short, that there is beauty in just being. Not being anything or anyone. Just being.

Philosophers have wondered for centuries what it actually means to be human. For some, like de la Mattrie, it lies in the material, whilst for others, like Descartes, it is in thought. In his famous Cogito, Descartes reduces human essence down to a seemingly unshakeable truth: I think therefore I am. 

But what if thinking is something more than an intellectual act? What is the mind is something more deeply woven into the body, inseparably connected? Maurice Merleau-Ponty challenged Descartes’ dualism, arguing that the consciousness and the body are not disconnected. He suggested that we do not inhabit a body, but instead that we are our bodies. We are beings grounded in movements and sensations, and our experiences of them. 

Yet, for disabled people, this entanglement is messy. For those of us who are mentally ill, the mind, which Descartes saw as the essence of being human, can become like a prison. It is, at times, a place of racing thoughts, of spirals, and of noise. Western philosophies have long privileged the mind and condemned those whose minds operate differently. For those whose minds will not rest – whether from mood swings, anxiety, ADHD, or trauma – the idea that our thoughts could define us feels oppressive. Our minds are a storm, and we are drowning in their waves. Stillness, then, is a reclamation of our humanity. It is a reminder that we are not our thoughts,  but the ocean that holds them. 

Disabled people have long challenged the idea that humans should be measured based on their productivity. This idea extends also to psychological disabilities, where the pressure to “get better” or “be productive” can feel like a demand to erase a part of our lived experiences. In Oxford, where the day-to-day is consumed by tutorials and essay deadlines, this pressure feels at times monumental. Stillness then is rebellion. It says: I am not here to perform, to mask, to produce. It is to refuse a world that measures worth in output or compliance. 

The sea I sat beside is a mirror for the human condition. It is vast, it moves in waves and tides and storms. It is both still and restless, just as we are. Many philosophers through the ages have described the sublime, the wonder, the awe, at times the terror, of something so intricate, so magnificent, that is overwhelms the human mind. 

The sea is this awe, and in it, stillness is the sublime of the ordinary. It is the reminder of the self unburdened by expectations or pressures. It is an act of self-love, and of world-love, to notice beauty without the filter of productivity, to notice the intricacies, with all their flaws, and to value its indifference.