Silence

What a terribly noisy world we live in. I sit at my desk at work and listen to two or three different radios from coworkers’ desks. The phone twelve inches from me rings every fifteen minutes. In between, I’m paged on the overhead speakers. All day people constantly come up to me with their requests. I can’t walk to the bathroom without being called aside. Shouting, laughing, arguing, conspiring. I leave for lunch, and I flip through the radio just to hear something – talk, music, news, anything but silence! I leave work and sit in traffic, and listen to the car horns blare and teenagers blasting thudding crap – I mean, rap. I get home, and I put the television on, for background noise if for nothing else. Then the phone starts ringing – telemarketers, as many as three an hour. I eat dinner with my family at the dining room table, and jazz or classical plays on the radio. Then its upstairs for two hours of TV watching, and all the advertising that comes with it. And then I wonder why I can’t sleep six or seven hours straight.

S I L E N C E …

I know its value. I desperately desire it, often allowing myself, powerlessly, to become visibly irritated if I don’t have it. Yet, why do I avoid it when it presents itself? Why do we as a society avoid it?

Are we uncomfortable with only ourselves, only our thoughts?

Have we been trained, Pavlovian-style, to become receptacles for advertising, for the twenty-four-seven news cycle? Are we unwilling addicts to noise? Is this something we’ve all chosen for ourselves, if even by default, by not-choosing silence? Or is this all just the impotent ranting of a type-B person in a type-A world?

I can’t read a paragraph of exposition in a good book without unrelated thoughts crowding my mind, the lingering aftereffects of a day of noise …

Are we uncomfortable with only ourselves, only our thoughts? Or is there something else we may be afraid to hear?

One day, one weekend, I want, more than anything else, to be alone, to be silent, to be only with myself. Well, perhaps not only myself. Maybe, just maybe, if I can spend a weekend, a day, an hour, in quietude … perhaps … I can hear that still, soft voice.