Thinking about silence

A Silence Not Empty

A new year often brings with it the urge to clean and organize.  There's always the rubble of the holidays to clear away, and suddenly the idea pops up:  "How did that closet get so messy?"  I'm clearing out this blog.  I found several posts in draft format, most of them incomplete as if I had been distracted by other matters or lost the thread.  This one is complete enough to get the gist, and it's very much on point for how I'm feeling right now.

Do you ever just long for peace and quiet?  How often do you get it?  I think about it now and then, when I spend too much time rushing from appointment to appointment, meetings, even visits with friends.  My mind works better, I believe, in silence--or at least with white noise. 

Yesterday I sat in my den, listening to the silence around me.  It was quiet, yes, but silent, no.  I could hear the faint hum of the refrigerator.  Being on my own now, that is not a white noise.  It's a worry.  Is that sound normal?  Does the thing need attention?  I could also hear the ringing in my ears.  More hearing loss, I suppose.  If I tried that sitting on my porch, which I love to do, I would hear the not-as-distant-as-I-would-like sounds of traffic.  But I would also hear the birds, which seem to abound in my neighborhood these days.  Sometimes there might be the slight sound of a breeze through the trees.

Perfect silence is difficult to achieve, and the sterility of that silence might be less comfortable than we think.  Even so, at times we need to shut out the noises of our lives and take the time to regroup.  I am not at this point suggesting the new mindfulness or the old meditation.  I am thinking more about getting off the merry-go-round of our days long enough to look around at our lives--past, present, future.  Are we going in the right direction?  Is there something that we have forgotten?  Are we satisfied that we are doing the good we mean to do?

 

I think we have to make silence in our lives.  Turn off the phone.  Shut down the computer.  Make a day without commitments to others.  We might do some necessary activity that doesn't take much thought--wash dishes?--we might find some pleasant place to sit and plan the coming days--pen and paper?--we might take a break from reality with a good book or a movie--try Bollywood!  What you're looking for is a chance for the really urgent things in your life, the important things, to bubble up to the surface.  

I wrote that on April 15, 2016.  I have no idea why I didn't post it, unless I thought it was too personal or too directive.  It is both, I suppose, but the changes struck me as I read it for the first time in nearly 8 years.  I've moved, so I am farther away from the nearest highway.  I have only one small tree in my yard, not the 20+ that grew around my former home.  Birds do come, but I can no longer hear their song.  I am less worried about having to cope with appliance repair and such.  For one thing, I don't hear the refrigerator come on or give any indication that it's not functioning well.  For another, I have resigned myself to accommodating the uncertainties of calling for repairs versus the amazingly easy choice to just live with it.

What hasn't changed is that need for silence.  I now wearing hearing aids--sometimes.  I often leave the house only to discover that I left the hearing aids at home.  I don't wear them enough while in the house (it helps protect from faster hearing loss to keep the brain busy with sounds) because they eventually become annoying.  Mostly it's because of the noise.  This is a very noisy world, uncomfortably so.  That makes it even more important to me to seek silence.  Why?  There comes a time to be still.  Just to be.  And in the silence, our minds can bring forward those thoughts that were pushed down and back and away from our conscious attention so that we can see the problems and issues and neglected ideas that may be just as important as that meeting or that podcast.

Silence can come in many forms. Nancy Billias and Sivaram Vimuri bring together a variety of issues related to silence in The Ethics of Silence:  An Interdisciplinary Case Analysis Approach.  I think that their work will merit further study for the insight that it will give us to the importance of silence as a carrier of meaning and message.  However, I am thinking more in line with Felix Adler's approach in "The Moral Value of Silence."  I am thinking of what Adler calls "the silence not empty" in which we give ourselves a chance to heal and to grow and to come to new understandings of our world, our needs, our relationships.