The violence of quiet moments

Acharya Tadany
Pune, 22 Mar 2026
Raw Meditation

Ah, these tedious and quiet moments,
if only they brought solace
to the torments of living,
they would be a paradise.

But they don’t.
On the contrary,
they become fertile soil
for invented enemies,
for imagined foes,
for projecting onto others
every evil we can conceive.

Distrust fuels these thoughts.
A sense of victimhood invades the psyche.
An almost unbearable rage spins within.

And so,
yesterday’s love becomes today’s hate.
A friend turns into a possible attacker.
An ally transforms into a deadly enemy.

The mind imagines battles,
betrayals, disrespects, insults, blows,
endless scenes,
sordid and tormenting.

Ah, these quiet moments
where everything takes place
except quietude and peace.

And the body obeys the lie.
The jaw tightens.
The chest hardens.
The breath shortens,
as if the dangers were real,
as if the war had already begun.

But nothing has happened.
Nothing
Nothing, except thoughts.

Yet these thoughts are enough
to poison the blood,
to burn bridges never crossed,
to destroy people who never attacked.

We become both victim and executioner,
judge and condemned,
writing sentences in a court
that exists only in the shadows of the mind.

And still, we believe it.
We believe every scene,
every accusation,
every imagined betrayal.

We rehearse conversations
that will never take place.
We defend ourselves
against blows never delivered.
We bleed from wounds never inflicted.

What a tyranny,
to be haunted not by the world,
but by one’s own thinking.

What a prison,
where the walls are made of memory,
and the guards are made of fear.

And in the midst of it all,
a silent exhaustion spreads,
thick, suffocating, inescapable.

Because there is no running from this.
No distance can be created.
No distraction lasts long enough.

Sooner or later,
the noise fades,
the crowd disperses,
the lights go out.

And one is left alone
with the unrelenting machinery within.

Ah, these quiet moments…
They do not reveal peace.

They reveal
What we have refused to face.

Acharya Tadany

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash