What I Found in the Silence
I didn’t realize how loud my life had become until everything went quiet.
Not the kind of quiet you get from turning off notifications
or stepping away for a weekend.
A deeper quiet.
The kind that doesn’t distract you,
it reveals you.
Portugal gave me that kind of silence.
Not all at once.
Not dramatically.
But slowly, over time.
In the mornings, sitting by the water,
watching the waves move in their own rhythm,
unbothered by urgency, untouched by expectation.
In the afternoons, lingering longer than I needed to,
letting meals stretch into moments of reflection.
A notebook open.
A pen resting in my hand.
No rush to fill the page.
And in the evenings, as the sun softened against the horizon,
I found myself sitting still…
longer than I’m used to.
Long enough to notice what I usually move past.
At first, it was uncomfortable.
My mind kept searching for something,
a plan, a next step, something to hold onto.
Clarity. Direction. Certainty.
But there was none of that.
Just space.
And in that space, something in me resisted.
Because stillness asks something of you.
It asks you to sit with what is,
not what’s next.
It asks you to listen,
not for answers, but for truth.
And truth doesn’t always arrive neatly.
It comes in fragments.
In feelings.
In quiet knowing that you can’t always explain.
There were moments I reached for distraction:
my phone, my thoughts, the familiar pull to “figure things out.”
But each time, I came back.
Back to the water.
Back to my breath.
Back to myself.
And slowly… something shifted.
Not in a way that felt like a breakthrough.
More like a remembering.
I started to hear myself again.
Not the version of me shaped by expectation or responsibility,
or the constant movement of life pushing forward.
But the part of me that had been there all along-
steady, grounded, clear.
We don’t talk enough about this in leadership.
We talk about action.
About decisiveness.
About moving forward with confidence.
But what if the real work begins before any of that?
What if it begins in stillness?
In the willingness to pause long enough
to hear what is true for you.
Not what is expected.
Not what is urgent.
Not what makes the most sense on paper.
But what is aligned.
Stillness didn’t give me answers.
It didn’t hand me a plan
or map out my next steps.
What it gave me was access.
Access to my voice.
My intuition.
My truth.
And with that came something I didn’t realize I needed so deeply:
Trust.
Not the kind of trust that comes from having everything figured out.
But the kind that comes from knowing
you can sit with yourself—
fully, honestly, without needing to rush out of the moment.
That you don’t have to force clarity.
That you don’t have to outrun uncertainty.
That what is meant for you
doesn’t require you to abandon yourself to find it.
Portugal didn’t change my life.
It slowed me down enough
to notice what was already changing.
And maybe that’s what we’re really searching for.
Not more answers.
Not more direction.
But space.
Space to listen.
Space to feel.
Space to remember who we are
when everything else gets quiet.
