What We Sit With Is Choice

There’s an old idea that sitting still is easy.

Anybody can sit. The work is in getting up and doing something.

I don’t believe that anymore. I think sitting with something is about the hardest thing a person can do.

Think about the last time something heavy landed on you. Bad news. A worry that wouldn’t quit. A question with no good answer. What did you want to do first?

Most of us want to move. We want to fix it, argue with it or get away from it. We pick up the phone. We turn on the TV. We go find somebody to blame. Anything but sit there with it.

That’s because sitting with a hard thing hurts. There’s no motion to hide behind. It’s just you and the thing, looking at each other. Nobody’s coming to take it off your hands.

Doctors know this. Good parents know it. Anybody who has waited through a long night beside somebody they love knows it. The waiting is the work, and it costs more than it looks.

So when I say sitting with something is hard, I mean it. It’s not a soft word. It’s one of the heaviest we’ve got.

Now here’s what’s changed.

We’ve never had more ways to keep from sitting with anything. There’s always something to reach for. A screen. A feed. A voice that will tell you what to think before you’ve finished feeling it.

And now we’ve got a machine that answers anything in two seconds.

Ask it a hard question and it doesn’t pause. It doesn’t sit with it the way you would. It hands you a clean paragraph, neat and sure, and the hard question feels settled.

But was it? Or did you just get to skip the part where you had to stay with it?

That’s the trade nobody talks about. Quick answers feel like relief. Some of them are. But some questions aren’t supposed to be answered fast. Some need you to stay with them a while, turn them over and let them work on you before you decide.

When you hand those to a machine, you don’t just get an answer. You give up the sitting. And the sitting was where you were going to figure out what you believe.

I’m not against the machines. I use them every day. They’re good tools when they’re used right. But a tool is supposed to help you carry the load, not take it out of your hands so you never feel the weight.

Not everything in life is chosen. Some things just land on you. Sickness. Loss. Trouble you didn’t ask for. Nobody picks those, and nobody should tell you that you did.

But even with the things you didn’t pick, there’s a choice left. It’s how you sit with them. Whether you stay or run. Whether you look at it straight or let something else do your looking for you.

And with a lot of what sits beside us every day, we did choose it. We chose the feed we keep scrolling. We chose the voice we let do our thinking. We chose to keep the machine at our elbow from morning to night.

That doesn’t make anybody a bad person. It just means the door swings both ways. If we let it in, we can decide how it behaves while it’s here.

That’s what I’ve been after with the Baseline. It’s a set of plain rules you hand the machine before the work starts. Say what you know and how you know it. Don’t dress up a guess as a fact. Tell me what you can’t do before it costs me time. Don’t rush me past a hard question with an easy answer.

It doesn’t do your sitting for you. Nothing should. What it does is keep the machine honest while you sit, so what’s beside you isn’t pushing you along faster than you mean to go.

The rules are only half of it. The other half is you deciding to stay with the hard thing long enough to know your own mind.

So here’s my question for you this morning. What are you sitting with right now? Not what you’re running from. What’s sitting next to you, every day, whether you notice or not?

Some of it you didn’t choose. That’s life.

But some of it you did. And what you choose to keep company with shapes you more than almost anything else.

Choose it on purpose. Sit with it honest. Don’t let anybody, or anything, rush you past the part that makes you who you are.

That’s the hard part. It’s also the part that’s yours.

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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

” Attic Thoughts”-library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing