Quiet

Me True Ann-Sister's post on drug-pushing cheerleaders, and the decline in use of antidepressants and anti-impotence drugs, has got me thinking again about what's missing in our lives, and why we think we need all these aids to performance.

There's no quiet anymore.

The constant chatter -- in our minds (guilty), on our computers (guilty), in our homes (no lo contendre) -- the multi-tasking "handhelds", the background whirr of electronics, jet planes, lawnmowers, cellphones, talk shows, iPods . . . we're blocking out the emptiness that's supposed to be at the center of our lives.

I don't mean emptiness in the nihilist sense. More like the Buddhist sense. Or the Jewish sense: after all, the Holy of Holies in the Temple was -- an empty room. Our entire spiritual capital centered around a spiritual capitol with space at its center -- an unoccupied throne, a room ready for inner light.

As that space at the center of us gets crowded out, meaning is obscured and awareness dims. The room gets filled with stuff. We don't feel right. So we fill the room with more stuff.

Perhaps we still go to church, mosque, synagogue, zendo. We know the choreography but the music -- music, whose rhythm and melody is defined by the spaces between sounds -- is now continuous cacophony. We feel strangely empty, but in fact we are precisely the opposite: we have no center anymore.

We live in spaces created at the center of structures. We are structures with empty spaces in the center -- spaces that get filled by breath, by solids, by liquids -- these spaces define us even as they sustain us.

Our world functions best when it uses this model.

One reason we lack this space, and why so many of us think of spiritual traditions as anachronistic, is -- stay with me here -- that we have so little access to Nature. Nature is empty: empty of us. The natural world shows the constant emergence, interplay and demise of things and beings. It is vast, unregulated, unwired, uninhabited and uninhibited. It is space. And there never has been less of it.

This holiday season -- whatever your spiritual bent, whatever your orientation, whatever your medications -- find a time and place where you can experience significant quiet. It doesn't matter what you do there: maintaining and experiencing the quiet will be all the doing you need.

Then, when you come back, the sound and the people and the Palms and iPods will fill the space back in. But at least you'll know it's there: your own personal Holy of Holies.

--T.A.

Comments

[Vikki]

I love nothing more that the dead quiet of my neighborhood in the middle of the night. But I never get to hear it anymore, because my boyfriend has to sleep with the air purfier, basically a white noise machine, on. He claims he can't sleep without it because it's "too quiet."

Too quiet to sleep? I don't get it.

[david]

Hysterical.

Like my wife, who needs a noise machine when sleeping near the ocean, because the sound of the waves unsettles her.

Under these conditions, she usually sets the sound machine to the "ocean" setting.

[sail on]

Stopping the noise and hurry is what I gained by living on a sailboat and wandering for 2 years. I try to explain to people how it changed me and the idiot-sounding phrase that always springs to my mind is: It put space inside me. On our boat we were out in nature so much of the time, most nights anchored in a bay or river. You're right, Bro - being in nature is the key to sanity and to knowing how poorly our stuff - as opposed to our experiences - fulfill us.

[JewishAtheist]

Very true, TA.

[Alison]

Just last night, I underlined this passage in the book I'm reading:
"I'm convinced we're born with a reverence for the natural world, and that such an affinity can be strengthened, maintained, corroded, or buried - like anything else in the world ... Without wilderness we ultimately compromise our ability to imagine further. Without wilderness, we ultimately become less human. Whether we like it or hate it or are indifferent is beside the point; we need it." ~ Rick Bass, A Texas Childhood (originally published in Doubletake magazine)