In Search of Silence …
My soul yearns for silence. It is impossible to find. It is like seeking the enchantment of a forest or the raw beauty of a wilderness but making do with a park or a campground.
I spent many summers at my grandmother’s, deep in Siberia. She lived at the very edge of her village. It might be weeks before you see or hear an airplane. I knew the train schedule, which carried passengers and was not very long. No one, not even the village doctor, had a phone. There was no internet. Cars were scarce. A colored TV was a luxury, an event you told your neighbors about, and an excuse for the said neighbors to stop by for tea and marvel at the advanced piece of technology. My other set of grandparents still used a horse-and-carriage mode of transport. There was a sort of tranquility that seemed to have disappeared from the Western world— at least in daily life. And here I come to a material point— the daily life. I don’t want to wait until vacation, nor do I want to live my life the way contestants do on the Alone show. What I speak of should not be a sensation found in a reality show. I mean, we eat, sleep, and engage in all manner of activities on a daily basis. My life, much like most of you who are reading this and the majority of those who’ll never read a line of this post, is firmly tethered to what we call modern life with its deadlines, schedules, extracurricular children’s activities (God forbid we ‘underdevelop’ them), an ever-insistent presence of a screen with its beeping, notifications, and entertainment. The smaller the screen, the more convenient and, therefore, more addictive. My mind whirls to the days I could hide inside the currant bushes, lean against the cedar fence my grandfather built, and breathe the intoxicating, rich scent of dirt. It smelled of sweet fermentation and possibilities.
There was not a sound for hours, but what the wind made, playing with leaves and grass, the sound of bumble bees, which were nearly the size of my thumbs and seemed to adore the type of daisy flower my grandmother liked to grow in her flowerbeds. Only now, when it is utterly unattainable, do I appreciate the wholesomeness of my upbringing, and though I’m only in my forties, at the time, Siberia was not only a far-removed geography but also a time capsule removed even farther from the rest of the world. I often tell my children, “I was born in another century.” Little do they know that I mean so much more than simply saying I was born in the seventies. I was born when proper, majestic silence still existed. I didn’t have to look for it, wait for it, or plan for it. It didn’t get on my calendar, nor did I set an alarm for it. It was just there, no different from the sun, the moon, the wind. It was part of me and my thought processes. It allowed me to be me. I could, indeed, hear myself think. These days, even if I attempt to be “off the grid,” to pitch my phone for a day, the noise that lives in my head, created mainly by digital clutter, wouldn’t quiet. The ripple effects of our noisy lives last well beyond the point we’ve shut down devices. Our brain has become a device.
Still, I make an effort, striving to find the sort of silence, the kind of quiet I remember. I take myself for a walk in the early hours of the morning, usually in the “’tween times,” when day and night kiss each other in passing, and neither owns the space. The world is never quiet, but it is slower in the morning, the songbirds are louder, and the nocturnal creatures are just trying to make themselves scarce. I stand in my flowerbeds, close my eyes, and touch the plants.
This lack of silence tends to sever human connections, which is the greatest tragedy of all. You know that feeling when things have slowed down enough, and you feel like you have time to think and reflect on the conversation you had with your child, spouse, friend, or neighbor? You are suddenly struck by the ‘aha’ moment—‘Oh, that’s what they meant,’ you say. You know, that space where you allow your thoughts to come loose so that you can untangle them without the demands of anything or anyone on your person; that space where you could finally freely stop playing Scarlett O’Hara saying, ‘I’ll think about it tomorrow;’ that space where your brain is free and empty enough to laser focus on someone’s face, voice and truly see and hear them.
No, I haven’t found it yet, but I get closer, some days closer than others. I refuse to think this true quiet had gone extinct. I look for it daily as I need it daily to stay sane and genuinely human. Perhaps it looks for me as well. For now, I shall be content to meet it in passing as the storm rages around us.
