The Quiet Ones

Nobody is making a documentary about her.

She doesn’t have a podcast. She’s not building a personal brand. She has approximately 340 followers on Instagram, most of whom are relatives and one very enthusiastic former coworker named Dave.

But every single week, without announcement, without applause, without a single person telling her she’s doing an amazing job and to keep going —

She shows up.

Maybe she’s the woman at the school board meeting. The one who reads every agenda item, asks the uncomfortable question, and stays until the end even when the end is 10:47 p.m. and everyone else left at 9.

Maybe he’s the man who drives his elderly neighbor to chemotherapy every Thursday. Not because anyone asked. Not because he posted about it. Just because it needed doing and he was there.

Maybe they’re the one who keeps the community garden alive. Who writes the letters to the editor that may or may not get published. Who shows up to the protest even when the crowd is small and the cameras have gone home and it feels a little bit like shouting into a very indifferent wind.

The quiet ones.

We don’t talk about them enough.

And I think that’s worth noticing.

Because we live in a moment that rewards volume. That mistakes visibility for impact. That has somehow convinced us that if it isn’t documented, shared, liked, and algorithmically amplified —

Did it even happen?

It happened.

It is happening.

All around you, right now, in the unrecorded margins of daily life, people are doing the slow, unglamorous, deeply necessary work of holding things together.

Not heroically. Not dramatically. Not in a way that would make a compelling three-minute reel.

Just steadily.

Just quietly.

Just because they decided, at some point, that this was the kind of person they were going to be.

I think about this when the news gets heavy. When it feels like the loudest, most outrageous voices are winning. When cynicism starts to feel like the only rational response to a world that seems allergic to nuance and decency.

I think: somewhere right now, someone is making a meal for a stranger.

Someone is teaching a child to read.

Someone is sitting with a person who is dying and making sure they are not alone.

Someone is planting something they may never see bloom.

None of it is trending.

All of it is essential.

Here’s what I want to say to the quiet ones — and maybe you are one, maybe you’ve forgotten that you are one:

The work counts.

Even when no one sees it.

Even when it feels small.

Even when the thing you’re trying to hold together keeps threatening to come apart anyway.

It counts.

History is not only made by the names we remember. It is made by the ten thousand people behind them who showed up without credit, without recognition, without a verified checkmark or a book deal or a standing ovation.

The quiet ones are not supporting characters.

They are the story.

And in a world that is very, very loud right now —

Quiet, steady, deliberate presence is its own kind of power.

Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.

Including the algorithm.

Especially the algorithm.

Julie Bolejack,
The Mindful Activist

🎲 Bonus: Random Info You Didn’t Know You Needed

The man who painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling really, really did not want to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor, not a painter. When Pope Julius II commissioned the project in 1508, Michelangelo protested, lobbied for someone else, and generally made his feelings known with the enthusiasm of a person who has been asked to spend four years lying on scaffolding with paint dripping into their eyes.

He did it anyway.

He spent approximately four years on his back, in physical agony, painting one of the most celebrated works in human history.

He complained about it the entire time.

There is a poem he wrote during the project that includes the line: “I am not in a good place, and I am no painter.”

He was, it turns out, both wrong and exactly right.

Sometimes the quiet ones don’t feel like quiet ones either.

They just keep going anyway.

first day

It’s April, Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit