Another dark, wet, not-motivated-to-go-out kind of day. I don’t have to go out, so that’s ok. Pausing is good. I have no words today. It’s quiet. No birdsong.
The postman has nothing for me, but even so I enjoy seeing him walk up and down the close. There is something cheery about his bright red wet-weather gear, shining against the dullness of the street. It makes me smile.
I start to write a list of other things that make me smile. Cat videos. A vase full of roses. Lucky bamboo in a terracotta vase. Jay calling to check I’m ok. Green ink. Lucia. Penguins. Compliments – given and received. Blue skies. The sea. My bedlinen. Soft warm socks. Strangers who return a smile. The bus coming round the corner just after I have arrived at the stop. Q.I. Taskmaster.
Small things.
I am easily pleased.
Fairy lights. Glitter. White frost. Rainbows. Hot air balloons. The colour purple. Black velvet. Springsteen. Though, to be fair, he can also make me weep. Weeping is also sometimes necessary. Not today though – today is a wellness day. A be-good-to-myself day. A recuperation day.
I listen.
The clock. Distant traffic. The sound of the pen on the page, a soft brushing sound. The sounds of my own body, sniffling, coughing, breathing. A crunching in my neck. Quietness.
There would never be this degree of quiet when I was growing up. There would always be a radio playing or records or the TV. Perhaps that’s why I loved it so much as a teenager when I had the house to myself – sometimes I would play the old records or watch TV, but often I would switch everything off and it would be beautifully quiet.
I treasure this. After all the loud years, and as much as I still love music, I cherish the quiet hours.
I am blessed by peace. I won’t call it silence. I don’t want the world to fall silent. But rather the absence of noise. I stop writing and think it is because I have nothing to say, but perhaps it is
because I don’t want to fill the page, don’t want to get to the end of this journal entry and move out into busyness. Maybe I just want an excuse to continue sitting here in my corner listening to the quiet.
I wonder, briefly, if anyone else is doing the same thing. Unlikely in the case of anyone I know. They will all be busying themselves right now: working, holidaying, exercising, dealing with whatever life is throwing at them. Their homes will be full of conversation or music or news broadcasts.
Background noise we used to call it, when the TV or the radio was on but no-one was watching or listening to it. “It’s company,” Mam used to say, which reveals a truth. People want the noise so they can pretend that someone else is there, because they are afraid of being alone. Afraid of what might arise in them if they sit in the quiet. Or even if they walk through it, work through it in their daily chores. Just being in the nearly-not-quite silence.
We grew up in busy. We’re told in grief to ‘keep yourself busy’. Busy is good. Family, school, social, work, caregiving, always busy. Never learning to be still, to be quiet, to listen to the sounds beyond the noise. It’s even worse for today’s children, even harder for them to ever be truly alone, switched off, learning to be at peace with the world and themselves, in the quiet places. It is no wonder that unwellness is on the rise among the young. Where is the space for reflection, for unforced creativity, imaginary worlds, imaginary futures? Where is the time for them to become acquainted with who they are? Do they even know that being alone and quiet for a while is simply something they can choose to do? A solitary walk, that is just a walk, with no words or pictures needing to be brought back from it. Doodling on a piece of paper that they will then throw away. Lying on their bed looking at the ceiling, pondering the cracks, and the shadows, and who chose that lightshade, and why, and whether it is time to change it for something else.
I fear they will never learn how to be held by solitude – and it is such a necessary thing to know.
It is important to learn to trust that in the quiet our thoughts might initially ambush us, but once we smile at them, acknowledge their presence, but decline to spiral down with them, they too will settle. We don’t have to think. We can pause. Listen to the quiet sounds. Notice the things we cannot hear. Clickety keyboards. Cell phone beeps. Sirens. Mindless chatter on repeat. And the ones we can. Rainfall. Tree breeze. The gentle hums and creaks of the house holding itself together, doing its job. It’s never silent, but it is peaceful.
And I am in no hurry to move away from it, even as I write the last line in my journal. I prolong the feeling by turning to poetry – Nathaniel Perry’s reflections on February – and something like it – Heather Sellers’ Field Notes From the Flood Zone.* Short, quiet reads.
When I do move from my corner chair, I’m still listening – to the way my footsteps sound different in the kitchen, louder than in the hallway – to cutting of tomato, the echo of a coffee mug placed down too abruptly on the granite worktop. I could spend all day thinking about what I hear, when the noise is turned down. The sounds behind the noise. The quiet music of life that we insist on always drowning out.
The day remains quiet. Only partly by design. It is a dark, wet day and I don’t want to go out. I am still recovering from an injury and I am sleepy-tired. Other than a short walk to the shops, I stay home. I read. I write. Admittedly I also watch a little TV (true crime and Star Trek seeing as you asked) but I switch the set off early. I read Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. I notice the silence of the evening. I go to an old photo-album and write a response to the first faded picture. I wander through a long-form work in progress and edit a little, move some things around, add some thoughts in another place.
None of it has a definitive purpose. All of it feeds into my soul purpose. When we work in the quiet, we do bits and bobs, odds and ends, but they are all the small things that call to us in the moment. That’s one of the whispers behind the noise. Do this little bit, it says. If we can't hear it above the noise, it doesn’t feel like enough, so we look for something bigger, but when we step behind the
noise, the whispers speak more clearly. Do this little bit, they say. And when we have, they will whisper which next little bit. Step by step, stitch by stitch. Quietly moving forward.
Even when we don’t see the path. The quiet leads us on.
The quoted pieces were published in "New Letters" (Summer/Fall 2021)
