Silence

A few mornings ago I paused for a moment as I was getting dressed, and I noticed something that I have rarely experienced in the past seven years: complete silence.

I am staying at a kind of dormitory near my daughter’s house in Burtigny, Switzerland. At present, there is almost no one else staying here, so there are few internal noises. And Burtigny is a very quiet little village, so there is not much traffic through the center and few other sources of sound.

Sitting in absolute silence was a treat, but at the same time, it wasn’t completely comfortable. I guess this is because I experience it so seldom at home in Kharkiv. I’ve become too accustomed to the mind-cluttering noises and other distractions that are endemic to my daily life there.

So Much Noise

I live amid a cacophony of human, machine and other sounds. I have discussed these unwelcome noises in previous posts such as Substandards of Living and Just a Fond Memory.

In my thin-walled apartment, I have to put up with disparate neighbor noises ranging from arguing couples to shrieking children (which are still preferable to the drunk partiers I used to have below me). And we frequently have inebriated visitors squatting on the bench outside my bedroom window to talk, shout and argue.

The building itself offers up assorted noises like whining water pipes, the whoosh of water down the sewer outlet from a flushed toilet above me, the buzz or rattle of washing machines and other devices, and the clanging of the metal door that guards the entrance to the building. On some evenings and weekends, I am treated to the hammering, drilling and other sounds of various renovation projects.

Of course, there is the almost constant noise of traffic on the street outside the building: horns, unmuffled engines, loud stereos and, of course, the delightful screeching of under-maintained marshrutka buses.

All of this is why I keep a stash of earplugs handy for sleep time.

Away from home, the level of noise and other distractions is about the same. It’s exceedingly difficult to find the solace of true quiet anywhere in Kharkiv. It’s not the fault of Kharkiv particularly; it’s a big city, and cities by their nature are places where the hustle and bustle leaves almost no room for peace and quiet.

Here He Goes Talking about the Mountain House Again

When I lived in the Colorado mountains, quiet ruled. I gave a good description of it in the post, Just a Fond Memory:

When I first moved there, it took me a few weeks to get used to the complete silence, especially at night. The usual local noises were the gentle sound of the wind rustling through the pines and aspens, morning songbirds, the occasional cawing of a crow, and in rare instances, the barking of foxes. The nights would be especially silent… and dark.

It was wonderful… and meditative.

Why Silence Matters

Sometimes I forget how important it is to have some real silence in our lives. In silence, you can focus, you can concentrate your mental and spiritual energy, you can rise above the ordinary and reach a higher level of functioning. Silence enhances creativity, allowing space for great ideas to be realized, and it allows you to sort through the myriad of thoughts and issues to chart a more effective course for your life.

When you are distracted by sounds or other things (the Internet, for example), your mind is constantly pulled in too many directions and prevented from achieving its best. But even worse, the mind becomes weak and lazy; it comes to prefer the distractions rather than the joy of work and achievement.

To repeat a concept I wrote about in the post, The Soul, the Mind and the Heart, lack of silence allows the physical mind to more easily prevent the spiritual mind – and thus the person as a whole – from being the best it can be.

Experiencing the morning quiet of my room here makes me realize how much I miss having such silence in my life – and how much I need it. Being able to escape to silence periodically is spiritually regenerative, enhances my creativity, and bolsters my ability to keep everything else in live in the right perspective.

I need to make more room in my life for silence, and I need to create an environment in which I can get back to daily meditation – something I have let slip and neglected for far too long. For the next few days I have left here, I need to come up with a plan to defeat the distractions back in Kharkiv.

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p.s. - I have been working on this post for a few days since I started it. Now in my next-to-last night here, there are new sounds in the place: I can hear some kind of music, and a bit earlier I heard a crying child. 

Earplugs tonight.