This issue considers stillness and solidarity as necessary to orientating oneself to health care practice and professionalism. These two are both actions and virtues, which enable students’ and clinicians’ transformation from bystanders to upstanders. Stillness is conceived herein as intentional discipline applied to creating deliberate, restorative spatial and temporal interruption from day-to-day demands in order to nourish the moral motivational generosity needed to care well for patients and to be good colleagues. Solidarity is conceived herein as requiring deliberate nourishing in health professions education and work environments, such that slowing down, a necessary precedent set of actions to becoming still, can be robustly achieved and engaged. This issue explores ways in which solidarity can be considered less as a set of political actions of single individuals and more as a collective organizational and professional capacity for responding with care to both our unique and common vulnerabilities.