Comment: Silence is Golden, or possibly Silver

Quiet.

Silence.

This is rare in my home, and rarer still in my mind. I don’t know how to be quiet very well. In fact the only time I am quiet is if I’m in a meeting and I’m not on as a speaker or participant, or when I’m alone drinking coffee. I may be silent but usually there is some kind of noise going on. I think I fear silence, in a way. And I’m not alone. By the number of people who are surgically attached to their cell phones 24/7, it’s obvious that I’m not alone. We all seek constant comfort, reassurance, and distraction in the form of other, which usually involves noise.

This is why meditation is so difficult for me. And most of the planet.

When we are asked to just hush, it’s almost so easy it’s hard. Or so hard it’s easy. But to maintain silence, to sit with quiet, that’s another story altogether. I am particularly unaccustomed to silence as I live in a home with two small children. Silence is truly golden, and rare, in my home.

Even at night, the snuffly, snore-y sounds fill the air. Dad snores. And often, one child or the other needs mom, or, usually, dad, since he’s the go-to guy at night. Fans, white noise, we crave some kind of sound to keep us feeling sane and help us relax enough to get to sleep.

I both love and fear silence. It makes me feel like jumping up and doing something. It makes me feel like filling it. But I am starting to get the idea that maybe filling it isn’t always in my or other people’s best interest.

Sitting still quietly doing nothing is our ultimate challenge, and it’s one I seem to be avoiding almost every day. We long for quiet but when we get it, like a dog chasing a car, we don’t know what to do with it. We flip on the radio, pick up the phone, or fill our aural silence with verbal noise, through texting, emails, IMs. There are so many ways now to fill our silences. And we are compulsive about doing so.

It feels like silence is going to make our heads explode. If I just sit and do nothing, and hear nothing, maybe that means I am nothing. Or maybe it means I’m everything. And everyone.

But when I feel myself silent, I am constantly waiting to be interrupted. I don’t know a life that is not interrupted with either physical noise or mental chatter. My mind constantly overflows, and silencing it rarely happens. Sometimes when I am running and listening to my Ipod, I feel silent inside, but technically that’s not silence, because I am playing music and pounding the pavement as I do so.

Still, a meditative state isn’t necessarily quiet, but I think it probably should be. If you are busy listening to other things then you’re not really present in the moment and thus aren’t really silent. Listen to nothing. That’s the hardest thing in the world to do. I don’t know if I’ll ever last more than a few seconds without the mental noise piping in through my cerebral speakers, like bad muzak at a mall that’s unstoppable and unappealing.

But at least once in awhile, I need to turn off NPR, tune out the kids and their video, turn off the Itunes and shut up and sit still.