Why we need stillness to be aware of movement?

Imagine a room with six or more people in it. The conversation goes like this.
Person 1: So, what else do we need from the Indian grocery store?
Person 2: Yogurt
Person 1: I have added it to the list
Person 3: What about pasta for dinner? Or we could do tacos
Person 1: I don’t eat pasta
Person 3: You don’t eat pasta?
Person 4: We can do tacos, then, right?
Person 5: We should get garlic too
Person 3: Will we get tortillas in the Indian store?
Person 6: What is the name of the lake behind us?

Now, add a couple of kids and activities in the kitchen to the above. The conversation may not make any sense, but things still happen, and most importantly, I found the above situation so funny that I had tears in my eyes. This is how conversations sometimes occur when trying to get stuff done. And I have always wondered how confusing or chaotic it may seem to an outsider. There are so many threads to the conversation, and we all keep going down these paths until we realize we have forgotten the original discussion and go back to it - the cycle starts again, and yet, somehow, things get done. I am not kidding when I say this, but Indian weddings are the same - there is no way you can ‘plan’ one. I naively thought I could create Excel sheets and get a plan done, but I found out that my dad had been downloading and storing them in a folder because he did not know what to do with them. After having my wedding, I can understand why planning won’t work - sometimes, things have a way of working out, which might seem inefficient, but it is the only practical way to get them done.

And now, what if I tell you that the above conversation took place with the following background? The picture below is Queenstown in New Zealand, a place so beautiful that there is no spot where you can stand and not see the scenery. I was journaling one of these days, and as I was writing, I was acutely aware of the stillness around me - the mountains, the water in the look rippling with the wind, the black swans bobbing in there and in contrast, my mind chatter - chattering about how quiet it is outside, am I going to warm outside etc.? The internal noise suddenly seemed very loud - the beating of my heart, the tension in my shoulders, the slight cold in my fingers, the warm toes with socks on them, and the constant chatter of my monkey mind.

Something about nature, kayaking on a lake or walking on a trail, seems to have this uncanny ability to calm us down. I remember this in London - it is a busy city, as you can imagine, but it has a lot of parks. And when you enter them, it’s like the outside world drops away, or rather, you have no choice, and noise drops away in the presence of the stillness of nature. We need both the stillness and the chaos, two sides of the coin, to experience both. After all, we are beings experiencing life as humans in its entirety. It is not about shutting down the internal mind chatter but learning to observe it without getting dragged by it or even if you do bring it back to the original conversation - stillness. And in case you were wondering, we had terrific tacos for dinner that night.

Which side of the coin are you experiencing right now? Stillness or Chaos?