Back when my children were toddlers underfoot, there were many days when I heard a constant stream of alternating chatter, screaming, laughing, whining, crying, and singing. Back then, Barney and Dora played incessantly as the soundtrack of my life. I fielded endless “whys” from sunup to sundown. Why I hafta go sleep? Why did Hiccup the hamster die? Why is Dora’s head so big? (That one will have to remain one of the universe’s mysteries.)
Some evenings, after failed attempts at playing “Quiet as a Mouse,” I just had to blurt, “Mommy’s ears are really tired! Can we give them a little rest for a few minutes?” Back then, I would have paid big bucks for five minutes of quiet alone in the bathroom, and nap times were manna from heaven. I mainlined the quiet and stillness like a heroin addict.
Now that one of the children is off to college and the other is completely independent and often doing homework or in his own world wearing headphones at a computer screen, the quiet I longed for has arrived. And it brought along its friends, anxiety and restlessness. The silence prods me: is there something you should be doing? Someone you should be looking after? Where’s that list of To-Do’s and action items?
While I don’t mind the quiet, I’m not very good at it. I come by it honestly. I’m pretty sure I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen my father sit down and just relax. I’m not sure he gets the concept, really. He’ll go on vacation to visit one of his kids and end up patching our drywall, repairing a privacy fence, or installing a ceiling fan. He doesn’t stay in one place for very long. After a couple of days, he’s ready to get back on the road. Things to do, places to go. You know these people. Often they are our mothers or grandmothers, who slaved over holiday feasts only to be bobbing up and down from the table like the Whack-a-Mole game, their own dinners untouched and cold.
A few years ago, I learned of a piece of music composed by John Cage in 1952. It’s called 4’33”, and it consists of three movements entirely of rests. The performer appears on stage, sits at the piano to begin while the audience waits in anticipation, and then nothing. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. The pianist counts all the measures of rests as the audience squirms. What is going on? Did he forget the music? Does he have stage fright? People look at one another nervously.
Four minutes and thirty-three seconds is a long time to be quiet. Just ask a toddler playing “Quiet as a Mouse.” Eventually, you start to listen, not to the music, but to the absence of it: the creaking of the seat cushions, a cough, someone’s whisper, the rustle of a program. You’re forced to settle in, get past the initial discomfort, and hear a different sort of music in your surroundings. Even the sound of your own breath becomes a choir of its own, filling the empty air with notes of spontaneous melody.
There is a beauty that arises from stillness, from silence, that we often disregard because it’s not as urgent or demanding as noise. It’s like the well-behaved child reading by herself who gets no attention because the rowdy cousins are swinging from the drapes in the other room. The dearest of friends are those who can sit still with you in the hospital waiting room, those who don’t have to keep up a barrage of chatter lest the room grow uncomfortably quiet. There are tense silences (when you’ve just laid the baby down and are tiptoeing soundlessly out of the nursery like a ninja) and easy, comfortable ones (when you’ve turned in for the night with your spouse and you’re both reading in bed companionably, conversation optional).
What this new-found quiet at my house has taught me is that I haven’t practiced it very much. Silence and I haven’t spent much quality time together. My day is usually full of conversations, phone calls, TV, traffic, the car radio, podcasts, itunes, even a running commentary in my own head, much like those from my kids that used to make my ears so tired. Even if I’m sitting quietly, I’m occupied with a book or my phone.
I know I’m not alone in this. Aside from the technology addiction that many of us have (admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery, people!), we don’t know how to sit still in the quiet and just be. We demand constant entertainment, distraction, busyness, and noise, which is why the 4’33” concert piece so unnerves audiences. I have to wonder what we are so afraid of? What do we think will fill the quiet if we let it happen? If we turn off the car radio while we’re running errands, what rushes in? If we sit quietly for a few minutes without scrolling through Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube, what thoughts arise?
Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline elaborates on the practice of silence as a spiritual discipline. As with most things spiritual, if you empty yourself of one thing, something else takes its place. Empty yourself of noise and silence settles upon you, often bringing its own kind of disquiet. What thoughts are there, lurking beneath the noise? I’ve been practicing being quiet, enjoying the silence, hearing what’s already there instead of injecting my own noise into the universe.
All the noise is exhausting, and we don’t even realize it until it’s absent and we breathe deeper and our shoulders relax. Without the car radio on, once I run through my own stream of consciousness thoughts, the quiet often leads me to prayer. “Well, I pray,” you say. “I’m so disciplined I even have a quiet time every morning, just me in the quiet before the day starts.” Awesome. You’re way ahead of me. But prayer is a conversation, not just you phoning in your thoughts or requests. Often we just yak away and forget that there’s a second act. Being still and knowing. Listening in the quiet. If you don’t think that there might be an answer, then why waste your time in prayer? No telling what might bubble up from the quiet and surprise you. The still, small voice is awfully hard to hear when you drown it out.
In the movie Get Smart, one of the coolest gadgets was the Cone of Silence. Once under it, 
all noise completely stopped, like inside a vacuum. Being a silence rookie, I wish I had one of these convenient devices that I could activate whenever I need a “moment of silence.” (There I go, dependent on technology again.)
I still appreciate some noise in my days. I like a good car jam as well as anyone (celebration is also a spiritual discipline, by the way)! But I’m learning through my circumstances and newly quiet house to appreciate the silence and the lessons it teaches.
Can I admit that I find taking my car through the car wash so peaceful? I turn the radio off and something about the quiet swishing and rhythmic thumping of the washer pads on the car and the otherwise quiet interior is what I imagine a womb to be like.
I relate to this article because I always feel there is something to be done and find it odd to just sit and be still. I, too, am trying to learn a new song…guess I should listen to 4’33”. Thank you!
I like it Bonnie! My kids leave me in that uncomfortable silence sometimes too, and like you, I’m having to “re-train” myself to accept it!