Put it on mute

I'm looking for quiet. It seems that now, more than any other time I can remember in my life thus far, I'm searching for silence. In this beautiful wonderful amazing life-from-concentrate essay by Brian Doyle called "The Meteorites" he talks about how "slowly [he] searched for silence, and by the end of the summer [he] had learned to sit quietly and watch the waves of sound crash on sticky tables." I don't think I've learned to watch the waves of sound crashing, I just feel like they're crashing down on me. I'm assaulted by sounds all day. People talking, music blaring from my roommate's speakers, the constant nag of over-loud TV, the constant nag of my own thoughts, the hammering of passing traffic. I wish I could take all the noise around me and turn it down to a low hum--or maybe not even that--the way you turn down the volume on a stereo by spinning a round dial with your fingers. I feel like I could figure out most problems or unanswered questions if I could just find some quiet for long enough time. I try and think things over in the shower, because the murmur of the water is almost as good as silence. But my mind usually goes blank once the water is turned on, as if I'm so stunned to have quiet that I go right into some kind of stupor. I have to consciously prod myself to think. I get distracted by nothing (as in, nothingness distracts me) and keep coming to myself to find that my mind is blank and I have to try, again, to think about something.

Silence isn't always a good thing. There are always those silences where I know I should say something ("are you okay?" "thank you" "I love you" "I hate this" "Can we stop the car so I can go to the bathroom?") but don't. There are the silences that mean that you asked a question of someone--or yourself--and there's no answer to it, or else it's an answer you don't want. There are those tense silences around a dinner table or over the phone in the middle of the night where you're just hoping to dissolve or explode--whichever is more effective. There are the silences that mean that whoever you just got the nerve to bear your soul to wasn't listening and you make your own silence, realizing that they didn't hear. There are the silences that mean that no one is calling for you. There are the silences that mean you're too angry to speak. Basically, there are a lot of bad silences.

But there are good silences.

I can point to specific things that gave me an appreciation for silence.

First: my dad. To say my dad is an introvert would be an understatement. He is not a talkative guy. I remember driving in the car with him while I was growing up; we didn't talk very much, but it was comfortable. I knew that we were both in our own, separate worlds of thought, but we could share a confined space in total quiet and total ease. My mom has never been as comfortable with this. There was one particular trip in which we were driving from Oregon to Utah and no one had said a single thing for probably an hour. I was fine. My dad was fine. But my mom said something about not being able to stand it, and flipped on the radio. I almost never feel like I have to force a conversation with my dad. Sometimes we talk, but a lot of times we don't. And that's really okay.

Second: Last summer the radio in my car broke. At first I was devastated (as much as you can be over a radio, for pity's sake). I was so used to having it on wherever I drove. But as days passed I realized that having that quiet as I was going from place to place cleared my mind. I'd get out at my destination and feel calm and like my brain had been kind of purged. It's like the way you feel after throwing up--like you got everything out, and you're cleaner somehow--but for my mind. Odd as it sounds, I starting having conversations aloud with myself. I figured things out. I got to know myself better. I was probably one of my own best audiences.

Third: The book, The Chosen, by Chaim Potok. A beautiful book. I get a crush on Reuven Malter and half wish I was Jewish every time I read it. Which is beside the point. Ahem. Anyway, the book talks a lot about silence. Duh. But in it, Danny Saunders is raised in silence. His father, the Rebbe, doesn't talk to him. They only time they talk is when they study the Talmud together. The Rebbe tells Reuven that in silence "you hear the world crying." He raised Danny in silence to teach him to listen to that crying, to learn compassion. I agree with that. Not that I don't want to speak to my children or something, but that when we stop running our own mouths and listen to and observe people, we learn about them. I think we get to know their hearts.

In that same essay by Brian Doyle he talks about how he had to clean up a boy (Doyle is a counselor at a summer camp for young boys) who has soiled himself. Doyle talks about "understanding dimly that my silence with this weeping child was the first wise word I had ever spoken."

I'm not sure where I'm going with all this. I like talking with people, I love music. But sometimes I wish I could turn it all off, because I keep thinking that if I did, a knot would untighten in me and rest--and I'd find something I was looking for.