Last month, I invested some time in a call to a dear friend who described his life as “running on a treadmill in quicksand.” He had a great job, a stable income, and by external measures, was succeeding. Yet he felt profoundly stuck. The promotion he’d been promised kept getting delayed. The side project he was passionate about had stalled. Even his extracurricular activities felt routine rather than invigorating.

His story echoed dozens of similar conversations I’ve had recently. An entrepreneur friend whose business has plateaued after years of growth. A talented writer who hasn’t published anything for a while. A director-level professional who knows she needs to leave her company but can’t seem to take the first step.

What strikes me about these conversations is how quickly we often leap to solutions. New job. New city. New strategy. New relationship. We treat stagnation like a problem to be solved rather than a message to be heard. We become so focused on movement, any movement at all, that we miss what the stillness is trying to teach us.

Our culture has conditioned us to fear stillness. We equate motion with progress, busyness with importance, and constant growth with success. When we feel stuck, our first instinct is to identify the blockage and remove it.