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.  

Recycle Your Ex

I couldn't resist opening an email captioned "Flush Your Ex Is Back."  I was amazed to read a message from Who Gives a Crap toilet paper company (their bamboo is my paper of choice) to see that they were recycling (pun intended) a previous campaign to turn karma into a reality with an invitation to send in old love letters, poems, and other paper evidence of a love gone bad.  Their promise was to recycle those notes (literally) into toilet paper, which could then be, well, used and flushed.  Their call was to "Get Petty," "turn heartbreak into toilet paper," and remember "What goes around comes around."

All in good fun, right?  With a side dose of therapy.  I do recall, sitting with a friend at her chimenea, a tot of some very smooth adult beverage in hand, burning her divorce papers and, I, some old letters that I really didn't need to keep around.  As healing as that act (or beverage) may have been, I am a little saddened that I did not, at that time, know about "Who Gives a Crap" as anything but an expression of dismissal.  Fire is good, but flushing would have been even more satisfying.

But seriously, folks, recycling matters. For Who Gives a Crap, recycling comes with a double purpose.  (1) They recycle paper into a useful product.  (1) A portion of their profits is donated to charities that build functioning toilets in places where few or none exist.  

Even better, I found this at the end of their front page (and other places on their site):

Acknowledgement of Country

We first started in Melbourne, on the traditional grounds of the Wurundjeri people. Today our team spans the globe, but most of us are still on land whose rightful custodians are First Nations peoples who have cared for our land, water and sky for tens of thousands of years. We pay our respects to Elders past and present and commit to Wominjeka - to come with purpose - leveraging our business, products and community to uphold our responsibilities to protect this planet according to their example.

 Wominjeka.  Sounds like "Ethics" to me.  Nothing petty about it.

Patriotism

 

Adler Study, Case A, Shelf 5

As part of my work on the Bibliography of Ethical Culture, I have begun to try to make a case for a better record of the contents of the Adler Study at NYSEC.  It wouldn't be any of my business, of course, except that there is a literal treasure trove of history, knowledge, and seriously interesting stuff on those shelves.  One step that I am recommending is the use of photography to document the current configuration of each bookcase and shelf.  The above photograph was taken with my old Android phone (don't ask me the model).  

Recently, just out of curiosity, I enlarged this photo to see if I could read the spines of these books.  Decades of light exposure have faded many of the titles, but I could see a few.  One struck me as a matter of interest for the Bibliography, so I checked it out on archive.org.  Sure enough it is there, since it was published in 1918 and is now out of copyright.

The volume is by Horace J. Bridges (1880 - 1955), born in England and recruited by Stanton Coit as an Ethical Culture leader; Bridges served in the Chicago Society until about 1945.  This one of his many publications, On Becoming an American:  Meditations of a Newly Naturalized Immigrant, can be seen in the picture above (the red book between the black one on the left and the green one on the right).  I really can't read every item that I add to the Bibliography, although I sincerely wish I could.  In this case, however, I took advantage of the scan published in the Internet Library and took a look at the Preface.  A faint underline in pencil caught my attention, and I read the following:

. . . Patriotism denotes the spirit which is ready to live and die for the ideals of one's country, not only in war with foreign enemies, but also when its standards have to be asserted against the perverted sentiment or irrational impetuosity of one's fellow citizens.  It implies, accordingly, that one shall be ready to think for one's nation as well as fight for it. (pp. viii-ix)

Yea, verily.

And this is why I do this work.  Lacking an Ethical Culture leader in the Ethical Society of Austin, we must conduct our own conversations with the past, because the past is not only our foundation in Ethical Culture, it is our passport to the future.  Without it, we wander in circles, repeating the same mistakes and solutions, making little forward progress into new paths. 

Lest we continue to wander in circles while I try to get to my point, let me say that I find this "message from the past" very relevant to our present.  Even more so when I connect it to Adler's reminder in his Founding Address that "the future calls to us."   I believe that we are called by our future--our future country--the fellow citizens of our future--the children and grandchildren of our future--to serve our country well as we go into this election.  Yes, we should register to vote--and encourage others to register.  Yes, we should vote--and encourage others to vote.  We should also "think" for our country, think for the future, about the issues being used by candidates to influence voters.  Are they being accurate?  Are they being fair?  Are they looking at the whole picture?  Are they recommending ethical policies?  How can we turn our thinking into action--into words--that clarify the ethical issues that will have a positive or negative effect on our future?  

BeltBusters and Other Hyperbolic Foods

 

I had a small window in which to find something to eat a few mornings ago.  I had fasted for some bloodwork, forgot to pack some nuts to tide me over, and had another appointment coming up.  Rather than go for physical therapy (and a fair amount of exercise) on an empty stomach and nothing but water since the night before, I thought it prudent to stop at the nearby Jack-in-the-Box for something to take the edge off of my hunger.  That's when I read their breakfast menu and realized that it was packed with prompts to overeat.  Words like "loaded," "extreme," "ultimate," "jumbo," and "supreme" prefixed almost all of the items on the menu.  

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I hadn't been to Jack-in-the-Box for several months, and my eating habits have changed substantially.  I am now more aware of carbs and proteins, looking for vital nutrients wherever I can find them.  As I try to confront my past eating habits and make new ones, I have become somewhat sensitized to the degree to which we are bombarded with messages that push us toward (unhealthy) food in excessive amounts.  It's no surprise that those messages are generally not promoting green things.

I decided to check the other fast food menus in the area.  Burger King tended to have adjectives related to its name:  Bacon King, Big Fish, Royal Crispy Chicken.  Sonic also played on its name with SuperSonic, but generally just named the item and indicated whether something was its "regular" size or larger.  Whataburger was even plainer in its naming practices, just naming the item and then allowing for extra ingredients.  That includes "double meat" and "triple meat" options, so we are still looking at oversized meals.  Regardless of the names, extra large portions were readily available.

The pressure to eat more and more is not just our moms telling us to clean our plates (although that might be a good place to do some rethinking).  We are influenced by advertising on television as well as other media.  Billboards invite us to stop and eat.  Even at the grocery store, we are nudged in the direction of buying more with "jumbo" and "giant" size packaging and special deals that have us buy items in multiples and "save."

Even our concern for the environment can take some of the blame.  While those "giant" packages give us more to consume, they also take less packaging, giving us a real saving on the use of non-renewable materials for packaging.  Americans literally waste a third of the food we grow.  Knowing that, I find myself sometimes eating a bit more than I need to just to keep from wasting the food.  (Faulty logic, I know.)

Certainly obesity is a national crisis, ending lives prematurely and undermining quality of life in the years leading up to death.

What to do?

Perhaps we could start with a conversation about food.  How do we center it in our personal lives and in our Ethical Societies?  This is not a conversation about veganism, although that conversation might at some point be appropriate.  It is a conversation about how we value food as a means to build community, about how we center food as a focus of celebration and occasion, how we are affected by the availability of foods, how advertising shapes our relationship with food.  From this conversation, we might see some changes that we can make in our foodways--at home and at our meetings.   We might also see some changes that we'd like to see in our community--whether it is finding better sources of food or improving health education in our public schools or looking more closely at the food pyramid above and figuring out where to go from there.

Food Pyramid:  Copyright © 2008. For more information about The Healthy Eating Pyramid, please see The Nutrition Source, Department of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, www.thenutritionsource.org, and Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy, by Walter C. Willett, M.D., and Patrick J. Skerrett (2005), Free Press/Simon & Schuster Inc.”