The Stillness Protocol

A disgraced wellness influencer's curated spiritual journey to the Canadian north collapses into a blizzard-bound farce of frozen tech.

The lens is cold. A perfect, Bavarian-engineered circle of glass frosting at the edges. My own breath, a cloud of curated failure, fogs the world. I angle the phone down, catching the heroic jut of my jawline against the infinite white. The branding on my parka’s sleeve—a minimalist logo suggesting both a mountain and an upward-trending stock chart—is perfectly in frame. This is the shot. The rebirth. Hashtag Stillness Protocol. Hashtag HealingJourney. Hashtag BartIsBack.

“And so we find ourselves… stripped bare,” I murmur, my voice a carefully modulated baritone of trauma and emerging wisdom. The tiny counter at the top of the screen hovers at 12.7k viewers. Pathetic. Before the incident, I’d pull 200k for an unboxing of electrolyte-infused tongue scrapers. But this is a rebuild. We build from the rubble. We rise from the ashes. We monetize the apology tour. “Stripped of the noise, of the… the toxicity. Here, in the raw, humbling embrace of the wild, we are forced to confront the man in the mirror.”

I am, of course, confronting the man in the selfie camera. The lighting is difficult. The sun on the snow is a brutal, indiscriminate white that washes out the subtle agony I’m trying to project. I need less glare, more soulful shadow. I turn my head slightly. Better. The faint worry lines around my eyes now look less like ‘impending bankruptcy’ and more like ‘profound existential struggle.’

My thumb, numb inside a three-hundred-dollar self-heating glove that has decided to stop self-heating, hovers over the comment stream. It’s a waterfall of fire emojis and praying hands, interspersed with the predictable venom. ‘SNAKE OIL SALESMAN.’ ‘Where’s the refund for the Goji Berry Enema Kit, Bart?’ ‘Hope you get frostbite.’ The usual. My publicist, Anna, calls it ‘engagement.’ She says all clicks are good clicks. I wonder if she’d still say that if she could feel the phantom limb sensation where my sponsorship deals used to be.

Behind me, a sound like a chainsaw gargling gravel rips through my carefully constructed soundscape of wind and enlightenment. It’s Jean-Pierre, my guide. My government-mandated, authenticity-prop. He’s wrestling with the gas-powered ice auger, a monstrous corkscrew of orange-painted steel. He is a caricature of stoicism, a man seemingly carved from frozen pine and indifference. He wears a faded red plaid jacket, greasy snow pants, and a thick beard that has probably never been treated with jojoba oil in its life. He is perfect. A perfect, uncooperative, frame-ruining bastard.

“We’re just… drilling down now,” I say, trying to weave his noise into my narrative. “Drilling down past the surface… past the ego… to the life-giving water beneath.” I pan the camera over to him, a magnanimous gesture. ‘Look, peasants, a real person.’ Jean-Pierre gives the auger one last violent pull. The engine screams to life. He doesn't look at the camera. He doesn't acknowledge my existence. He just plants his feet, leans his weight into the machine, and the spiral blade bites into the ice with a deafening roar. My phone’s microphone peaks, distorting the audio into a digital shriek. The viewer count dips to 11.2k.

I grit my teeth, the enamel of my veneers protesting. The whole point of Jean-Pierre was the subtext. The silent, wise Algonquin guide (Anna checked, he’s technically French-Canadian with a grandmother from Timiskaming First Nation, but ‘Algonquin’ has better SEO) leading the fallen city-dweller back to the earth. He was supposed to nod sagely while I pontificated. Maybe utter a single, profound, subtitled sentence about the spirit of the lake. Instead, he just… works. Silently. Efficiently. As if this isn’t a high-concept content shoot but an actual fishing trip. The sheer nerve.

The auger punches through the last layer of ice with a wet gasp. Jean-Pierre kills the engine. The silence that rushes back in is absolute, profound. It’s the kind of silence that makes you hear your own blood pumping. It’s perfect. A perfect moment for a pithy, shareable quote about finding clarity in the quiet.

“You see?” I whisper to my phone, my audience. “The silence… it’s the canvas upon which…” Before I can finish my B-grade Rumi impression, Jean-Pierre grabs a plastic bucket, walks to the edge of the newly-drilled hole, and vomits loudly into the frigid water. It’s not a dramatic, soul-purging vomit. It’s a series of matter-of-fact, guttural heaves. He spits, wipes his mouth on the back of his glove, and gives me a look that is entirely devoid of emotion. “Bad gas station sandwich,” he says. His first words of the day.

My carefully cultivated moment of Zen shatters. The comment stream explodes. Laughing emojis. Skull emojis. ‘DID HE JUST PUKE?’ ‘LMAO, peak wellness.’ ‘That sandwich was more authentic than anything Bart’s ever said.’ The viewer count ticks up to 15k. Anna was right. All clicks are good clicks. I feel a hot flush of shame so intense it almost warms my frozen toes. I end the livestream.

The silence is back, but now it’s mocking me. It’s just me and a man who has just desecrated my spiritual fishing hole with processed meat and regret. He’s now calmly scooping slush out of the hole with a big slotted ladle, completely unbothered. He hasn’t created an awkward situation; he’s merely had one. I’m the one bathing in it.

“Everything okay?” I ask, because that’s what a person on a healing journey is supposed to do. Radiate concern. Hold space for others. Even if the ‘other’ just torpedoed your engagement metrics with a burst of violent indigestion.

“Yup,” he says, not looking up.

“Just… sometimes the body needs to purge, you know? It’s a release. A physical manifestation of energetic blockage.” My mouth is moving, spewing the old gospel. It’s a reflex. I could do this in my sleep. I have done this in my sleep.

Jean-Pierre stops scooping. He looks at me, really looks at me, for the first time. His eyes are a pale, watery blue, the color of the sky just before it snows. There’s no judgment in them. Just a vast, terrifying emptiness. An absence of any need to impress or perform. “Or,” he says, his voice flat. “It was a bad sandwich.”

He goes back to his work. And I am left standing there, on three feet of frozen water, in my thousand-dollar pants, feeling like the biggest fraud in the world. Which is, of course, exactly what the comment section on my last viral video had called me. The one where I’d claimed my bespoke blend of powdered mushroom and Himalayan salt could ‘re-align the user’s quantum frequency with the resonant harmony of the universe.’ It turned out it mainly re-aligned the user’s lower intestine with the nearest toilet. For forty-eight hours. The class-action lawsuit is ongoing.

I came out here to escape that. To rebrand. To pivot from ‘cosmic wellness guru’ to ‘humbled student of nature.’ But nature, in the form of Jean-Pierre, seems utterly uninterested in grading my performance. He’s setting up a small, portable shelter—a canvas cube on a folding frame. He moves with an economy of motion I, a man who once sold a twenty-part video series on ‘Bio-Hacking Your Locomotion for Optimal Chi Flow,’ can only dream of. Every movement has a purpose. There is no wasted energy. No dramatic flourish for the camera that isn't there.

“Need a hand with that?” I offer, stomping my feet, trying to generate warmth and the appearance of helpfulness.

“Got it,” he grunts, pulling a final strap taut. The shelter pops into its final shape, a sad, beige box on the endless white. Our home for the day. He gestures toward the gear piled on the sled. “Bring the heater. And the bucket.”

Finally. A task. A chance to be useful, to perform competence. I stride over to the sled, my boots crunching with cinematic purpose. I identify a small propane heater and a bucket. Easy. I grab them both. The heater is heavier than it looks. The bucket is light. I can do this. I am a man connecting with the primal act of carrying things. I am strong. I am capable. My inner monologue is my hype man, and he’s working overtime.

I take three steps and my right foot finds a patch of sheer, windswept ice beneath the thin layer of snow. My expensive, high-traction boots, guaranteed to ‘provide superior grip on glacial terrain,’ betray me completely. My arms fly out. The world tilts. The propane heater sails through the air in a graceful arc, landing with a dull thud in a snowdrift. The bucket, however, I manage to hold onto. I land hard on my back, the impact driving the air from my lungs in a pained whoosh. The bucket lands neatly on my head.

For a moment, I just lie there, a plastic hat blocking the merciless sun, the sky a dark, pail-shaped dome. I can hear Jean-Pierre’s footsteps approaching. They are not hurried. They are the footsteps of a man who has seen this before. He does not ask if I’m okay. He doesn’t laugh. He simply lifts the bucket off my head. His face appears, framed against the pale blue sky. He is not smiling. He is not frowning. He is simply… observing.

“That’s the minnow bucket,” he says. He picks up the heater, brushes the snow off it with a gloved hand, and carries it to the hut. Then he comes back and extends a hand to me. I take it. His grip is like a vice. He pulls me to my feet as if I weigh nothing. He doesn’t say anything else. He just turns and walks away, leaving me to grapple with the dual indignities of gravity and being mistaken for a bucket of baitfish.

Inside the hut, it’s cramped and smells of canvas and propane. Jean-Pierre has the heater lit, and it’s already generating a pathetic circle of warmth. He’s unspooling fishing line from a small, simple rig called a tip-up. Two tiny camp stools are the only furniture. This is my stage for the next eight hours. This is my crucible. My content cathedral. I need to salvage this.

I pull out my phone again. The battery is at 42%. The cold is murdering it. I need to be efficient. I’ll do a pre-record. No comments to distract me. Just me, my truth, and the claustrophobic beige walls of this ice-womb.

I frame the shot. Me in the foreground, looking thoughtful. Jean-Pierre in the background, out of focus, representing the esoteric wisdom of the land. It’s a good composition. I press record.

“Day One,” I begin, my voice hushed, intimate. “It’s… a lot. The sheer scale of this place. The silence. It forces an inventory. A moral and spiritual stock-take. You know? My guide, Jean-Pierre…” I gesture vaguely behind me. “…he doesn’t speak much. But his silence is… loud. It speaks of a connection that we, in our world of perpetual distraction, have lost. He is a man of the earth. He understands its rhythms, its secrets…”

Jean-Pierre chooses this exact moment to pull a massive, glistening sausage out of his bag. He bites off a three-inch chunk with a loud, wet snap. He starts chewing, his jaw working with the methodical grind of a quarry crusher. My phone’s sensitive microphone picks up every last masticating squelch. My profound monologue about primordial connection is now sound-tracked by a man eating cured meat like a wolf on a gut pile.

I pause, waiting for him to finish. He does not. He takes another bite. I can feel my eye starting to twitch. I try to power through.

“…a man who understands the circle of life,” I continue, trying to project serenity over the sound of sausage annihilation. “The give and take. The beautiful, brutal honesty of it all. Out here, there are no filters. There are no… shortcuts.”

Jean-Pierre pulls out a small flask. He unscrews it, takes a long pull, and then lets out a belch that seems to shake the very foundations of the hut. It’s a rich, resonant, multi-syllabic eruption that speaks of cheap whiskey and gastric liberation.

I stop recording. I can’t work under these conditions. This man is a saboteur. A one-man wrecking crew for my brand narrative. I glare at him. He catches my eye, holds up the sausage in a gesture of offering.

“Pepperette?” he asks.

“No, thank you,” I say, the words tight, clipped. “I’m in the middle of a five-day activated-charcoal detox. I’m cleansing.”

“Ah,” he says, nodding slowly. He takes another swig from his flask. “That explains the puking.”

My God. He thinks *I* was the one who vomited. The injustice is a physical blow. I want to scream. I want to explain the optics, the branding, the narrative arc of my healing journey and how his gas station sandwich has utterly defiled it. But I can’t. Because that would require admitting how much I care. And the whole point of this trip is to perform the act of not caring about the things I care about most.

So I just sit there, on my tiny stool, radiating a silent, furious calm. A wellness martyr. A Bodhisattva of the brand-damaged. I will meditate. I will rise above this. I will find my center, even if my center is currently sharing a 6x6 canvas box with a man who smells faintly of whiskey and processed meat.

I close my eyes. I focus on my breath. Inhale authenticity, exhale engagement. Inhale serenity, exhale sponsorship. A low rumbling sound starts, vibrating through the floor of the hut, up my stool, and into my newly aligned spine. I open my eyes. Jean-Pierre has produced a small, battery-powered radio. A tinny country song about a truck, a dog, and a broken heart is now filling the small space. He’s humming along. Out of tune.

This is my hell. A beige, propane-scented, country-music-filled hell. There’s no content to be made here. No comeback story to be filmed. There is only the cold, the sausage, the off-key humming, and the slow, agonizing death of my battery life. 38%.

An hour passes. Or maybe it’s a decade. Time has become a thick, viscous fluid. Nothing happens. The lines, dangling in the dark water beneath us, are still. Jean-Pierre seems perfectly content. He has eaten his sausage, had his whiskey, and is now meticulously cleaning his knife with a small, oiled rag. He works with a focused intensity that I find infuriating. How can anyone be so completely absorbed in such a mundane task? Where is the existential angst? Where is the desperate need for external validation?

I need to create a moment. If one won’t happen organically, I will force it into being. I stand up, a little too quickly. My head grazes the canvas ceiling.

“I’m going to go out,” I announce. “Just… be with the landscape. You know. Absorb the immensity.”

Jean-Pierre grunts without looking up from his knife. “Wind’s picking up.”

“The wind is part of it,” I say, grandly. “The struggle. The challenge. That’s where the growth is.”

“Okay,” he says, testing the blade against his thumb. “Don’t go far.”

The warning is an insult. I am Bart Sterling. I have summited the yoga retreat at Machu Picchu (by bus, mostly). I have paddle-boarded with dolphins in Bali. I think I can handle a little bit of Canadian wind. I unzip the hut door and step outside. The change is immediate and violent. The air isn’t just cold anymore; it’s angry. The wind is a physical force, a wall of moving ice particles that scours my exposed cheeks. The sky, which had been a placid blue, is now a bruised, slate-grey. The horizon has vanished, the sky and the lake bleeding into a single, disorienting swirl of white.

Jean-Pierre was right. The wind is picking up. But this is perfect. This is drama. This is adversity. I pull my phone out. 31%. I have one shot at this.

I turn my back to the hut, so it’s just me and the burgeoning storm. I hold the phone at arm's length, my face angled into the wind. I let the icy blast tear at my hair, my eyes water. This is it. The shot. Man, alone, facing the tempest. A metaphor for my entire life.

“Sometimes…” I shout over the rising howl of the wind, my voice raw, real. “Sometimes you have to walk into the storm! You have to let it strip you down to your very core! Because only when you’re truly lost… can you truly be found!”

It’s good. It’s powerful. It’s the clip Anna can leak to the gossip blogs. ‘Bart Sterling’s emotional breakdown in the wilderness.’ The clicks will be astronomical. I am a genius.

A heavy hand lands on my shoulder. I yelp, startled, nearly dropping the phone. It’s Jean-Pierre. He has put on a thick fur-lined hat with ear flaps. He looks annoyed.

“The hell you doing?” he yells over the wind. “I said don’t go far.”

“I’m creating!” I yell back, indignant. “I’m processing! This is my journey!”

“Your journey is about to get frostbite on its nose,” he says, pointing at my face. He pulls the phone from my numb hand. “And you’re going to kill the battery.” He shoves the phone into his own deep pocket. “Get in the hut. Now.”

He doesn’t wait for an answer. He just grabs the collar of my parka and physically pulls me back towards the beige cube, which is now straining against its anchors. He’s unbelievably strong. I stumble after him, all my performed dignity gone, a spoiled child being dragged back to the car. He shoves me through the zippered door and follows, sealing us inside. The roar of the wind diminishes to a muffled scream. The canvas walls ripple and bulge. The whole structure shudders.

“What was that?” I demand, my voice shaking with cold and fury. “You can’t just grab me! You can’t take my phone!”

“Blizzard,” he says, ignoring my outburst. He’s checking the straps holding the hut to the ice-screws. “Big one. We’re not going anywhere for a while.” He looks at me, and for the first time, there’s something other than indifference in his eyes. It might be pity. It’s worse than contempt. “You got no idea, do you? You stand out there talking to your little box and the world is ending around you, and you don’t even see it.”

“The world is not ending,” I snap. “It’s just some weather.”

“Out here,” he says, his voice low and steady, as the hut groans under a powerful gust. “That’s the same thing.”

And then it begins in earnest. The wind loses its intermittent quality and becomes a single, sustained, deafening roar. Snow, fine as sand, begins to force its way through invisible seams in the canvas. A fine, glittering dust settles on everything. The pathetic propane heater sputters, its flame dancing wildly in the drafts. We are trapped. And my phone, my only connection to the 15,000 people who were briefly interested in my suffering, is in the pocket of a man who thinks I’m a complete and utter moron.

The first day of the blizzard was a study in a very specific kind of hell. A hell of enforced inactivity and proximity. The tiny hut became the whole world. The roaring wind was the only sound. Jean-Pierre seemed to shrink into himself, becoming a part of the landscape. He checked the heater, sipped from his flask, and stared at a point in the middle distance, perfectly still for hours at a time. He was hibernating. I, on the other hand, was vibrating with a frantic, useless energy.

I paced. Two steps one way, two steps back. My mind, deprived of its usual diet of notifications and analytics, turned on itself. I replayed every second of my downfall. The interview with the journalist from a reputable publication I’d mistaken for a friendly blogger. The hubris in my voice as I explained how my ‘Quantum Salt’ wasn’t just a laxative, it was a ‘paradigm-shifting de-cluttering of the lower chakras.’ I saw the headline again, flashing in my mind’s eye: “GURU OF GOOP GIVES NATION THE RUNS.” I relived the frantic damage control calls with Anna, the sponsors pulling out, the tearful (and completely fake) apology video I’d filmed where I blamed my own ‘imperfect vessel’ for misinterpreting the ‘universe’s message.’

“It was a misunderstanding,” I said, suddenly, into the roaring silence of the hut. Jean-Pierre didn’t move. He might have been asleep with his eyes open. “The product. It was… potent. It was for advanced practitioners. People whose systems were already… aligned. The mainstream consumer wasn’t ready. Their toxicity levels were too high. The purge was too… aggressive.” I was talking to myself, but I needed him to be a witness. My confessor.

He blinked. Slowly. “You mean it made people shit themselves.”

It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of fact. The blunt, unadorned truth. And hearing it spoken aloud in this tiny, shuddering box, stripped of all its marketing jargon and spiritual platitudes, broke something in me.

“Yes,” I whispered. “It made people shit themselves. Violently. At work. At weddings. On public transport.”

He nodded, a single, slow dip of his chin. He took a sip of whiskey. He didn't say, ‘I told you so.’ He didn't say, ‘You’re a fraud.’ He didn't say anything. His silence was a void, and my ego, my carefully constructed persona, tumbled headlong into it. I started talking, and I couldn't stop. The words poured out of me, a torrent of self-pity and justification. I told him about the pressure, the numbers, the endless, insatiable maw of the algorithm that demanded constant content. I told him about the loneliness, the feeling of being a brand instead of a person. I told him about my childhood, about being a chubby, asthmatic kid who was always picked last, and the intoxicating thrill of finally being chosen, of being followed, of being ‘liked.’

Through it all, Jean-Pierre just sat there. He’d occasionally stoke the heater, or offer me a piece of dried moose jerky, which I refused. He was a rock, a wall, a silent, bearded therapist in a plaid jacket. I talked until my throat was raw, until the propane flame was the only light, until the wind had screamed itself into a kind of horrifying normalcy. And when I was done, when I had excavated every last ugly, pathetic piece of my soul and laid it bare on the frozen floor of the hut, he said, “You talk a lot.”

I had no response to that. He was right. I was a fountain of useless words. I slumped on my stool, utterly spent. He reached into his pocket and pulled out my phone. He handed it to me. The screen was black. The battery was dead. Of course it was. I was completely and utterly disconnected.

I don’t know when I fell asleep, but when I woke, it was to a strange, dim light. The wind had died down. A profound, almost holy silence had taken its place. It was the second day. Snow was piled high against the walls of the hut, filtering the daylight into a soft, blue glow. It was like being inside a glacier. Jean-Pierre was already awake, methodically re-spooling a fishing line. He had a small solar panel, no bigger than a book, unfolded and propped near a slit in the canvas, a thin wire running from it to my phone.

“It’s charging,” he said, without me asking. “Slowly.”

I didn’t know what to say. I had unloaded a decade of psychic filth onto this man, and his response was to quietly charge my phone. I watched his hands. They were chapped and scarred, but they moved with a deft, practiced grace. Mending the line, tying a tiny, perfect knot. He wasn’t thinking about it. He was just doing it. His mind and his hands were one.

My mind was a hornet’s nest. But for the first time, I felt a kind of quiet. The desperation had receded, replaced by a vast, hollowed-out exhaustion. I didn’t try to perform. I didn’t try to monologue. I just sat. I watched the snow melt and drip from the roof of the hut. I listened to the scrape-scrape-scrape of his knife sharpening a hook. I ate the piece of jerky he offered me. It was tough and salty and tasted real.

We spent the rest of that day in a near-total, comfortable silence. I found myself observing things. The intricate crystal patterns of the frost on the canvas. The way the blue light shifted as the hidden sun moved across the sky. The low, rhythmic hiss of the propane heater. My world had shrunk to this six-foot cube, and yet, it felt bigger. Clearer. When my phone finally chirped to life, indicating it had enough power to turn on, I felt a jolt of the old anxiety, the old Pavlovian need. But I didn't turn it on. I let it sit there, a black, silent rectangle. A dormant monster.

On the morning of the third day, we unzipped the door to a world remade. The sky was a brilliant, cloudless, impossible blue. The snow was a pristine, glittering blanket, sculpted by the wind into fantastic dunes and drifts. The air was clean and sharp and so cold it felt like a form of purification. It was beautiful. So breathtakingly beautiful it hurt.

Jean-Pierre went about his work, digging the snowmobile out, checking the lines we’d left set outside the hut. I followed him, my movements clumsy in the deep powder. I felt weak, washed out, but my head was clear. The constant static of my own internal branding monologue had finally gone quiet.

One of the tip-ups had its flag up, a small piece of orange cloth sticking straight into the air, signalling a fish on the line. Hope, ridiculous and unbidden, flared in my chest.

“Here,” Jean-Pierre said, gesturing to the line. “You take it.”

I knelt in the snow. I took the line in my bare hands. The braided string was cold and slick. I started to pull, hand over hand. There was resistance. Something was fighting back, a frantic, desperate energy transmitted from the dark water, up the line, and into my palms. It was alive.

I pulled and pulled, my heart hammering. It wasn’t a huge fish; the struggle was minor, but it was there. A connection. A real one. Finally, its head broke the surface. A small walleye, its scales a beautiful mosaic of olive and gold, its dorsal fin bristling, its eye a black, unblinking marble. It thrashed in the slush, beautiful and wild and doomed.

Jean-Pierre expertly unhooked it and handed it to me. The fish was surprisingly heavy, solid. Its body was cold and muscular, pulsing with a faint, panicked life. And my first, immediate, hard-wired instinct was to reach for my phone. It was in my pocket, charged to a respectable 22%. The light was perfect. The golden sunrise on the white snow. The glistening fish. The story was obvious. The triumphant return. The hunter. The provider. #CatchOfTheDay #Rebirth #NaturesBounty.

I pulled the phone out. I held it up, my thumb hovering over the camera icon. I framed the shot. Me, the fish, the sunrise. A masterpiece of performative redemption. And then I looked down at the fish in my other hand. I looked at its eye, staring into nothing. I looked at the vast, silent, indifferent landscape around me. A world that did not care about my story, my brand, or my comeback. A world that had been here long before me and would be here long after my digital ghost had faded from the servers.

I looked at Jean-Pierre. He was watching me, his expression unreadable as always. He wasn't judging. He was just waiting to see what I would do.

I lowered the phone. I pressed the side button, and the screen went black. I put it back in my pocket. I just stood there, holding the little fish, feeling its life pulsing against his palm, and for the first time in a decade, had absolutely no idea what he was supposed to do next.