I used to track hurricanes for a living.
I’d stand in front of a weather map and show you the wind speeds, the projected path, the damage potential. I understood storms better than most people ever will.
But here’s the thing nobody talks about: the most powerful part of a hurricane isn’t the wind. It’s the center. The eye. Dead calm. Blue sky. Birds circling overhead. Surrounded on all sides by 150 mph chaos — and yet, perfect stillness.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was the most important forecast I ever gave.
Because when my career collapsed — when the maps and the cameras and the identity I’d built for two decades disappeared — I found myself inside a different kind of storm. The kind that doesn’t show up on radar. The kind that lives in your chest at 3 a.m.
And I went looking for the eye.
Not by running from the noise. Not by pretending the storm wasn’t real. But by learning — slowly, painfully, beautifully — that there is a place inside each of us where stillness lives. A place the wind can’t reach.
I started calling it the center of the compass.
It’s not a place you escape to. It’s a place you remember you never left. The storm is real. The suffering is real. But so is the stillness. They exist at the same time, in the same space. One doesn’t cancel the other.
Right now, the world feels loud. I know you feel it. The scrolling, the headlines, the weight of it all pressing down on your attention like a hand on your chest.
But what if the most radical thing you could do today wasn’t to fight the storm or fix the storm — but to find the eye?
Just for a moment. Just one breath where you stop tracking the wind and remember the sky.
That quiet place isn’t weakness. It’s the most powerful position in the entire storm. It’s where clarity lives. It’s where compassion comes from. It’s where you stop reacting and start choosing.
It’s where everything changes.
I spent fifteen years learning how to find that center — and stay there. I wrote a book about it called The Attention Compass. It’s coming soon. But the center isn’t coming soon. It’s already here. It’s been here the whole time.
Close your eyes for five seconds. Feel your breath. That’s the eye.
Welcome to the quietest place in the storm.
Eric Wilson is the author of the forthcoming book The Attention Compass. Learn more at theattentioncompass.com