Silence Within

When all is silent, no music playing, no TV on in the background, no one talking nearby, what do you hear? Is there a voice talking to you from within? Or is there silence? Calm quiet? Peace?

I ask because there are those who do not live well with silence. They turn on a radio, or TV or stereo. Or they pick up their cell phone and rummage its keys, or maybe boot up the computer and scan emails or a few internet sites. They busy themselves with noise or reading; maybe they hum to themselves. They simply cannot live with silence.

I on the other hand like the quiet. In fact I seek it. Even luxuriate in it.

Silence is the creative palette in which I think whatever I will. Let the mind roam unfettered! Think thoughts which lead to no conclusions; or do they? 

I write best during deep times of silence. No distractions. Perhaps the sound of the furnace coming on or AC in its season. Otherwise no sounds at all.

I asked friends the question ‘what do you hear when silence surrounds you?’ Some of them answered: a roar of nothing, sort of a sensation of hearing blood coursing through veins. Perhaps you recall that sensation; it is sort of like your ears are straining to hear something that is not there.

When I was very young, maybe 5 years old, I recall sitting alone in the middle of the Mojave Desert. I was sitting on a large rock. Full sun and deep blue sky. It was mid winter so not hot. My outlook included a large outcropping of rock surrounding a deep chasm. No sounds of birds. No rustle of wind through dry underbrush. Just silence. Enormous world view without a sound! I listened for naught. There may have been a sense of roaring in the ears, but I don’t recall it just now.

What do you hear when there is nothing but silence? Can you even find such a place or time when silence reigns?

When I was a teenager my dad took me to an open house tour of lab facilities at General Electric. One of the sites included a sound testing lab complete with a silent room, walls lined with deeply finned, upholstered crevices designed to trap all extraneous noise. It was stunningly quiet, almost suffocating. Not the same experience as being outdoors in the silent desert.

Of course that suggests that nature provides more sound in silence than we think!

Why this fussy insistence on silence today? I think I’m impressed with the noisy distractions of our lives. Noise that takes the place of mindsets and thinking, or at least affects our thinking. I know there are people who can study in the midst of chaos and a din of sound including raucous music. I never could. I found it hard to read on morning train commutes. Or on a plane with jet engines roaring. I tried listening to music but only slipped into the netherworld of emotion and thought as the music took me on a rigorous journey. Its message en-rapt me. I could think of nothing else but what the composer wanted me to feel.

To this day I write in silence with no background noise other than the workings of the house – refrigerator cycling on and off, same with the HVAC, a passing vehicle if heavy enough to rumble the neighborhood. Otherwise silence is interrupted only by the sound of my fingers thumping the keyboard – and the thoughts trail across the screen making their tracks manifest whether of meaning or not to be determined by the reader!

As time passes the moments of silence are yearned for, to be used to make ‘sounds of logic’ or poetry or a complete world of ideas. A world of silence encompassing its own standard of sound ~ of thinking.

What do you hear at such times?

January 9, 2013