I did something this morning that I haven’t done in a really long time. I turned off the radio on my drive into town.
Usually I listen to the news or a podcast, sometimes I’ll listen to music, but not this morning. This morning I was craving some quiet. More than that really, I was craving silence. Between the chattering of the radio and the clammer of my own thoughts, it was just simply too loud in the car for my liking. So, I turned off the radio and drove in silence.
Well, sort of silence. I was still thinking, but at least now I could hear myself thinking. My brain wobbled along a winding path of thoughts. Like it was struggling to process, just burning through whatever popped up to make sense of it and push on to the next thought. I felt…scattered. I didn’t like it. I tried to quiet my mind by thinking of…nothing. Literally. I silently repeated the word nothing until I felt like the brain train had slowed down.
Better.
But something else was happening. My fingers, wrapped around the steering wheel, were tapping out a rhythm. And for a moment I thought, “Oh come on! You can’t be still and quiet for even a minute?” Ok, maybe driving in the semi-dark on a busy highway is not the best time or place to try to find a little serenity, but I persisted. I avoided turning on the radio and just let my mind go where it wanted and let my fingers keep tapping and pretty soon I was feeling a little more relaxed, a little more comfortable with myself.
You know what? I liked it and I don’t do it often enough. I don’t think any of us do.
Sometimes I will go out back, into the 3 acres of forest behind my house, find a tree stump and just sit. That’s it. I just sit and I look at the way the sunlight filters through the leaves of the tall poplars. I listen to the birds sing and watch them flit from branch to branch. I listen to our resident woodpeckers pounding the bark for beetles to eat. I close my eyes and feel the breeze. I sit until the tree stump becomes uncomfortable and then I walk a little farther and find a new spot to sit and listen and watch. It’s not silent, but it’s not noise either. It’s soothing. It’s restorative. It’s wonderful.
I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. – Chaim Potok, The Chosen
So much of my day is filled with noise. Does that surprise you? You would think working in a funeral home would be pretty quiet and sometimes it is, but there is always music in the background. There are often people in and out of the office. The phone rings. Sometimes, there are the predictable and unmistakable sounds of grief. And if our own noise isn’t enough, there’s a mechanical shop across the street that fills in any quiet gaps. At home, it’s the radio or the tv or the air pump for the fish. There’s always something.
I think there’s too much noise in my life, probably in all our lives. How long could you be silent? How long could you be silent in the presence of someone else? How long before you felt the need to fill the silence?
Something happens when I spend some time alone in a quiet place. I can hear myself again. I mean, really hear myself and when I’m finally really and truly relaxed, I can’t hear anything. It feels good to step back from the noisy world I live in, that we all live in. You should try it.
Silence is golden!