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For years, mornings in my house belonged to everyone else. There were lunches to pack, missing shoes to find, and a daughter who could never remember where she’d put her homework book. Evenings were dinner, dishes, homework questions, and the comforting sound of someone moving around the house. Later, at fifty-six, I could finally drink my coffee while it was still hot. I had imagined I would love the quiet.
This story is mine. I shared the experience and the ideas, and I used AI to help shape the writing.
This piece sits with Hexagram 52, Keeping Still: the season of meeting the quiet instead of filling it, steady as a mountain while the clouds move across it. If you have been wondering how to cope with an empty nest, this is where I started.
Instead of loving the quiet, most mornings I reached for my phone before my feet touched the floor. I checked the weather, then my messages, then the news. One video became another. By the time I carried my coffee to the kitchen table, my mind was already crowded with other people’s opinions, vacations, renovations, and very convincing advice about how to make the most of this stage of life.
Some evenings I did it again. I’d sit on the couch with a blanket over my legs, intending to check one thing. The next time I looked up, the room had gone dark and I had missed the sunset. I wasn’t sure when it had become a habit. Perhaps it was easier to listen to everyone else than to sit with the strange emptiness of a house that no longer needed me in quite the same way.
The Steady Pause
One Sunday morning, I noticed myself reaching for my phone while the kettle warmed. My daughter had called the night before. It had been a good conversation, full of small details about her new apartment and the pasta sauce she’d made from scratch. After we hung up, I felt happy for her, and unexpectedly lonely. I spent the rest of the evening scrolling.
Now my phone was right there on the counter. I picked it up, noticed the familiar tightness in my chest, and put it down again. I remembered that the first line of Keeping Still (each hexagram has six lines, read from the bottom up) speaks of keeping the toes still: pausing at the very beginning of a movement, before the rest of the body follows. I looked down at my bare feet on the kitchen floor. “All right,” I said to them. “Let’s start there.”
That, it turns out, is most of what mindfulness has ever asked of me. Not an empty mind or an hour on a cushion. Just one noticed moment before the habit takes over.
Come Back to You
I made my coffee and sat outside on the porch without my phone. At first I felt silly. Then I remembered an email I needed to answer. Then I wondered if my daughter had posted a photo of the apartment. My hand moved toward the empty space beside my chair, where my phone usually sat. I smiled. Apparently my hand had its own routine.
I stayed for one more breath. A squirrel was trying, with remarkable persistence, to get into the bird feeder. I watched until he succeeded.
I didn’t get up from that chair with a plan for my life. I did notice that I missed my children. I also noticed that I was looking forward to lunch with a friend on Tuesday. Both things could be true. That was the surprise of the quiet: with nothing filling it, there was finally room in it for me.
Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.
Often attributed to Deepak Chopra
Calm, Not Distant
That evening, I put my phone on the kitchen counter before settling onto the couch. I made it through eleven quiet minutes before retrieving it to look up a recipe. After that, I scrolled for a while. The next morning, I tried again.
Some days I remembered to pause. Other days I looked up from my phone and realized twenty minutes had passed. When that happened, I practiced putting it down without scolding myself. I could still have a quiet minute now. Stillness, I was learning, isn’t the same as shutting the world out. My children could still reach me. I had simply stopped being on call to every voice in my pocket.
Over time, those ten free minutes in the morning stopped being empty. They became the place where I sat with one hexagram from the I Ching, read a few lines, and asked myself one honest question before the day began. That small habit is the one that eventually grew into My Daily Return, and it started with a woman talking to her own feet on a kitchen floor.
Little by little, I began to think of the mountain when I felt the urge to fill every empty space. The mountain doesn’t chase the clouds away. It gives them room to pass. And on my good mornings, with my coffee in hand and my feet on the floor, I give myself a little room, too.
What would you hear in the first ten minutes of your morning if you didn’t fill them?
The quiet isn’t a sign that something is missing. It’s room. If you’d like a gentle way to spend those first ten minutes, the free guide, 5 Ways to Trust Your Inner Knowing Again, is a good place to start, no chart required.
