The Quiet Game

Since Geoff has been going back to school I find that I spend much more time alone. Often, I am pulling into the driveway at the end of my work day just as he is walking to his car to leave for class. Or, on my days off he is at work and I have long stretches of time where I am by myself. And even though I am an introvert, I often scramble to fill the silence with noise and distractions. Like I’m running from some unseen enemy lurking in the silence, threatening to…to what?

What’s so scary about silence?

If you’re a parent you would probably say, “Nothing. I’d love some of that.”

But then you might think about it and realize that silence probably means that your walls are being decorated with crayons or someone’s cutting someone’s hair who shouldn’t be, or there’s some other surprise awaiting your discovery. But even if you’re all alone with no kids home, you probably find that it’s difficult to just be still. Just you and your thoughts in the quiet. No Facebook. No Netflix. No Pandora. Just quiet.

If you’re like me, you might crave quiet and simultaneously run from it.

Because in the quiet we no longer have any props. In the quiet we finally tune into the hum of our inner chatter. We are faced with emotions we may be used to stuffing, thoughts we tend to push out of our minds.

But if we create enough margin for quiet, if we wean ourselves from constantly filling our spare moments with noise, then I think we can become more whole. We can have a richer inner life that doesn’t have to be pacified with the next video that’s gone viral or with how many likes our picture received.

Even if social media isn’t your thing, you can probably relate to this tendency to avoid quiet. We can find all kinds of ways to run from ourselves and ultimately, to run from God. But I propose that what we desperately need is to stop running. We need to be still. We need a little self-enforced quiet game.

Because our behavior changes when our thoughts change (and we all have something in us that needs to change), and our thoughts can’t change very effectively if we never think, if we never reflect. And we can’t reflect when every moment is filled up with something distracting us from our thoughts. 

But there are other benefits to silence too. When there's less noise in our days we have more of a capacity to notice and appreciate things that might otherwise get lost in the commotion or glossed over with distraction. And when we are alone with ourselves we can find a pathway to deeper relationships. Anne Morrow Lindbergh offers this insight:

 "...it is not physical solitude that separates you from other men, not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation...it is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger. When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others. How often in a large city, shaking hands with my friends, have I felt the wilderness stretching between us. Both of us were wandering in arid wastes, having lost the springs that nourished us--or having found them dry. Only when one is connected to one's own core is one connected to others...And for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude." -Gift from the Sea, p.37-38

Amazingly, Lindbergh penned those words over fifty years ago. What she hadn't yet experienced is how people in the future would often be alone without really being alone, because being constantly attached to an electronic device through which one interacts with the world can't really be called solitude. How much we need the reminder of her words today. Isn't it worth fighting for--this deeper life of reflection and connectedness to others?

For many, silence and solitude might only be able available in little snippets of time. Maybe it will mean getting up earlier or turning your phone off at certain times during the day. For me, being alone comes naturally in my schedule, but I must choose at times to come away from the self-imposed noise and truly be quiet. I'm still in training, so often my self-preservation instincts kick in, telling me to run from the discomfort of facing my true self. But the valuable things are always worth the effort it takes to attain them, and on the other side of the noise-detox is a quiet that can make us more whole if we will receive what it has to offer.