My name is Lucía and, for years, my life was a dizzying succession of to-do lists, chained meetings and notifications that vibrated before I could complete a thought. Anxiety became my soundtrack: there was always something pending, always an ‘after’. On a random Tuesday - because revelations don't need special dates - I felt that internal noise overtake my threshold. I closed the laptop at noon, left the building and walked aimlessly to a nearby park. I sat down on a bench, ready to do nothing, absolutely nothing, for the first time in a long time.

At first it was uncomfortable. My mind insisted on going through emails and projecting scenarios: ‘What if they cancel the project’, "What if my boss calls me? But, with no screen in front of me, those thoughts sounded like voices in someone else's room. I concentrated on my breathing, not with sophisticated technique, but with childlike curiosity: the cold air coming in, the warm air going out. I noticed my shoulders dropping, my jaw slackening. The clock ticked three minutes, five, ten; I lost count. In that time, something small but immense happened: I felt that I ‘was’ without needing to ‘be doing’.

The park was still the same - distant thunder, fluttering leaves - but I saw it differently. Every colour seemed sharper, as if someone had turned up the brightness of the world. Most striking was a sense of inner spaciousness: there was space between my thoughts, as if the mental traffic had become one lane and the cars drove without horns.

I went back to the office and the rest of the day went by with the same amount of challenges, but my reaction was different. I answered a difficult email calmly, listened before speaking in the afternoon meeting and even enjoyed the silence of the lift. Since then, I repeat that ‘park bench’ - or its equivalent - every day. I don't always reach the same depth, but the seed is planted: I now know that stillness is not running away from the world; it is returning to it with a clean presence.