The to-do list is seductive. It masquerades as productivity, as purpose, as proof that you’re doing enough. But I’ve started to wonder if the constant racing — the perpetual orientation toward the finish line — is actually a form of absence.
I arrived fifteen minutes early. That was intentional.
It was a 6am hot yoga class, and I wanted to ease in — to let the heat slowly introduce itself to my body, to find stillness before the stillness was asked of me. There’s something almost meditative about those pre-class minutes. The room hums. Your breath starts to deepen on its own. The day hasn’t found you yet.
And then, sixty seconds before class began, she arrived.
I don’t say that unkindly. But she was a force of weather — bag dropping, mat unrolling, blocks clattering, a rush of cool air from the door still dissipating around us both. She set up right next to me, and just like that, her urgency became mine. My shoulders crept up. My breath went shallow. The stillness I’d spent fifteen minutes building quietly scattered.
It didn’t settle. Throughout the entire class, her energy stayed turned outward — adjusting, fidgeting, occupying more than her space. The kind of presence that seems unaware there are other people in the room.
The teacher began class by anchoring us in a quote:
“Life is an echo. What you send out comes back. What you sow you reap. What you give you get. What you see in others exists in you.”
I sat with that last line for a long time.
What you see in others exists in you.
My first instinct was judgment. And then, almost immediately, the discomfort of recognition.
Because how often am I the hurricane?
How many times have I rushed into a room — a meeting, a conversation, a relationship — trailing the wind of my to-do list, my unfinished thoughts, my next obligation? How often has my freneticism landed on someone who was quietly, carefully tending their own stillness, and scattered it without my ever knowing?
The to-do list is seductive. It masquerades as productivity, as purpose, as proof that you’re doing enough. But I’ve started to wonder if the constant racing — the perpetual orientation toward the finish line — is actually a form of absence. Moving through spaces without ever really arriving in them. Present in motion, but not truly here.
The woman next to me never did settle. And I spent a good portion of that class more aware of her than of myself, which is its own kind of lesson — about how much energy we absorb from the people around us, whether we mean to or not. About how much energy we might be sending out without realizing it.
What am I echoing into the rooms I walk into? What do people feel in the moments after I arrive?
Connection doesn’t survive freneticism. It requires a quality of attention that a packed schedule quietly starves. And I don’t think the answer is simply to slow down — it’s to arrive. To give whatever room I’m walking into the same intention I gave that yoga class: showing up early, settling in, making space for something other than my own momentum.
The heat will do its work. But only if you let it.