Two Weeks of Silence
The Silence of Sweden: What Småland Taught Me About Mindfulness and Self-Love
Two weeks in Sweden. And now I’m sitting at my desk again, listening to the traffic outside the window and noticing how quickly the old pace comes back.
What has stayed with me most from these two weeks isn’t the pictures. Not the red houses, not the lakes, not the light over Småland. It’s the silence.
Not the kind of silence where simply nobody is talking. But the kind that comes when, all of a sudden, nothing around you has to happen anymore. No constant noise. Fewer people, fewer cars, less of that quiet pressure to always have to get something else done.
And I realized: bearing this silence isn’t that easy at all.
When it gets quiet outside, it gets loud inside
That was the real surprise for me.
No sooner had things grown quiet around me than it got all the louder inside me. Suddenly they were all there – the thoughts I usually organize away so well in everyday life. The feelings there’s simply no room for between appointments and to-do lists.
I really had to get used to just sitting there. Doing nothing. Looking at the water. Listening to the wind. Watching the clouds without feeling, after five minutes, that something really ought to start happening again soon.
The first few days felt almost like withdrawal.
And then, at some point, it tipped.
When the quiet became beautiful
I can’t say exactly which day it happened. But at some point the silence no longer felt empty. It felt good. Full, in a quiet way.
Only then did I realize how much I had been missing exactly that. Not the vacation. Not getting away. But this being-with-myself that, at some point, had quietly gotten lost in my everyday life.
For me, this has a lot to do with mindfulness – even though for a long time I found the word a little cheesy. In Sweden I understood that there’s nothing complicated about it. It simply means: being there. Really there. Without the next thought already breathing down your neck.
And it has to do with self-love. Because allowing yourself this calm, without guilt, without the feeling of missing out on something – for me, that’s a very particular way of being good to myself.
Now I’m back here
And I feel the restlessness right away.
The traffic, the people, the noises, the appointments, the obligations. This constant background hum. And along with it, everything inside me immediately became a little more restless again, too.
That’s on my mind a lot right now. Because I don’t want to connect this calm only with Sweden. I don’t want it to remain a place I travel to twice a year. I want to learn to bear it. To take it with me. To bring it into my perfectly ordinary everyday life – between work, screens and everything else that still has to get done.
I don’t know exactly how that works yet. Maybe in small moments. Ten minutes at the window, without my phone. A walk where I really just walk. An afternoon with nothing planned – and it’s allowed to stay that way.
What I do know: I miss Sweden. And I miss the calm I felt inside me there.
Maybe that’s exactly the beginning. That I miss it – and that’s why I’m setting out to allow it to myself here, too, already. Even before I move to Sweden next year.💙