I built a breathing orb to sit between my commits.
A few hundred lines, nothing more… a circle that swells and settles on a field the color of a terminal at two in the morning. You breathe with it, or you don’t, and either way it keeps its rhythm. I’d reach for it when the work got loud in my head, let it draw my breath down out of my throat and back into my belly, and then go write the next function with steadier hands.
It started as something only for me. Then I gave it a name and a domain… stillpoint… and put it somewhere anyone could find it.
Here’s the part I keep turning over. The thing it’s most defined by is everything it refuses to do. There’s no account to create. It doesn’t know who you are and never asks. No streak to protect, no notification waiting to ambush you tomorrow, no little number climbing somewhere out of sight. It will never sell what your breath is doing, because it never learns it in the first place. You arrive, you breathe, you leave, and the only trace is whatever loosened in you while you sat there.
That sounds like nothing. It’s nearly the whole point.
Because almost everything else we build has an appetite. It wants your minutes, your data, your thumb moving down the glass, your return tomorrow. We’ve grown so used to that hunger in our tools that we stopped hearing it… the way you stop hearing the refrigerator until it shuts off and the silence rings. A thing that wants nothing from you sounds broken at first. Then it sounds like mercy.
I’ve spent years now letting two practices lean against each other. Sitting on a cushion which led to walking meditation, and building things at a keyboard the rest of the day. For a long while I kept them in separate rooms. But, now I’ve stopped pretending they’re different work. The cushion teaches you to notice what grasps, what clings, what reaches out to grab… and once you can feel that movement in your own mind, you start to feel it in your software too. The grasping baked into the design. The clinging dressed up as engagement.
So you build the opposite. Something that sits with you instead of reaching for you. Something still.
There’s a word the optimists use for a future where our machines work this way, quiet and rooted, in service of living things instead of feeding on them. They paint it in green and gold, vines spilling over the server racks, whole cities that breathe. I love the pictures… but I don’t think you arrive there by rendering the garden. You get there the way you get anywhere worth going. One small refusal at a time. One thing that doesn’t take. Then another.
stillpoint is one small refusal. A few hundred lines that want nothing from you.
If your head is loud right now, go sit with it a minute. ☸