You and I Are Too Old to Fear Silence: the Gift of Quiet Contemplation
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
One person’s silence is another person’s deafening noise
As someone with no kids, and who married only briefly many years ago, I know several kinds of silence intimately. Silence inhabits me and I inhabit it differently than some.
Every morning I wake up in Oregon surrounded by regal fir trees. Out here, especially right now with the tom turkeys all about making little turkeys, an open window will allow their conversations in along with the sussuration of light wind in the trees.
The air is full of birds, not as many as fifty years ago, granted. Right now most of the songbirds are silent because up above the firs is a platoon of some twelve hawks. Singing loudly is a good way to end up as someone else’s breakfast.
But as the sun sneaks up and peeks through my office window just shy of six am, I can hear my new puppy working on a bully stick. Crows caw, the deer rustle through the grass outside, and the world is full of life and sound and spring.
My house is just far away enough from traffic and the small city of Eugene, Oregon that the bustle of daily life is distant. That’s by design. Not only do I not sleep well around such noise, I didn’t want the pollution from car exhaust in my house. That I was able to find such a place, I celebrate each day.
I once lived in a second-story apartment that overlooked a busy street in Brooklyn. I honestly don’t know how people do it, for noise sickens us.
From that article:
They’ve shown that noise pollution not only drives hearing loss, tinnitus, and hypersensitivity to sound, but can cause or exacerbate cardiovascular disease; type 2 diabetes; sleep disturbances; stress; mental health and cognition problems, including memory impairment and attention deficits; childhood learning delays; and low birth weight. Scientists are investigating other possible links, including to dementia.
In so many ways silence is a gift. What we fill it with, well, that’s another issue.
Every other day of the week I am treated to the wonderful sound of the sprinklers. This house came with sprinklers. I LOVE that sound. No idea why. I just love the sound of water on leaves, I guess. It means life.
When I need noise I have Netflix, or NPR, or even better, YouTube gives me all kinds of options for white noise. My faves: cicadas and katydids, thunderstorms and rain.
You can sure tell a farm girl, especially from the South, where the night used to be a symphony of chuck-will’s-widows and tree frogs and every kind of wild, wonderful thing.
Those days are gone, my world paved over with concrete and all the wild with it, then all too often filled with noise pollution and the pollution that comes with cars and air conditioners and gas-powered leaf blowers.
You and I are WAY Too Old not to deeply appreciate and value silence.
What some people consider silence, such as the dearth of sirens and traffic sounds and people and screaming kids or banging around in the kitchen, can be for others incredibly full of life. When all sounds are gone, man-made or natural, that is unnatural.
Silence, in this regard, means death in more ways than we can possibly understand.
There’s only one exception that I’ve found so far (I’m sure there are plenty) and that is in the profound silence of the Atacama Desert. While there is plenty of life in places like the Sahara and the ancient Atacama, the silence there is so absolute at times that the inside of the mind is deafening by comparison.
A while back I did a interview with a young woman at a Midwestern university. She had moved there from Florida, my birth state. She told me that the silence in the dorms was unnerving and she couldn’t sleep. She bought a white noise machine, as I did, so that she could doze off.
I knew exactly what she meant.
For me to be able to sleep during adventure travel, I pack technology to help drown out the campfire chatter. I can’t sleep with people talking, so a tiny machine designed for tinnatus is a life-saver. (not an affiliate link) For those of you who, like me, can’t sleep worth a damn on those long international flights for all the noise, this thing is a lifesaver.
Others wrote recently about how roosters were annoying. I’m going to take a side step here to make a point, not about silence but about travel, because the rooster comment hit home.
Back in 2013 on my 60th birthday, I stayed at a little Costa Rican hotel adjacent to local villages. The chickens awoke early like I did, and their clucks and caws and crowing were wonderful. As was the lively laughter of the locals walking to the beach to fish for their daily food.
The owner of the little hotel told me that tourists bitched endlessly about the roosters and the laughter.
If you insist on traveling to such countries you might want to plan to get used to the sound of life there. After all, isn’t that why you travel?
If not, stay home, for crying out loud. The colonizer attitude that local ways of life are JUST SO ANNOYING aren’t appreciated. Take your money and go to Disneyland.
I get a lot more pissed off about loudmouth partiers who have no regard at all about others’ right to sleep after midnight at the hotel. I’ll take roosters over such jerks any day.
Okay, rant over.
Let’s get back to silence.
Fellow single Oregonian
wrote this piece which got my attention and caused me to consider:
White noise, that of birds, a gurgling brook, a thunderstorm, are the kind of “silence” that soothes me. I need nature. Other people can fall asleep to The Foo Fighters and call it good even if all the neighborhood windows are shattering while you snore.
None of this is judgemental; we like what we like.
But the silence Sue is reckoning with, at least in part, can feel like the great black hole left in our lives after the death of a spouse, an animal, the loss of a wonderful job. Here’s how she describes it:
Right now in my house, it’s like this big white cloud of nothingness that fills every inch and pushes against the walls and ceilings.
Worst, perhaps, is the loss of the friendly sounds of someone making coffee in the morning, the smell of it wafting through the air to those still in bed. On a really good day, a breakfast coming in to you on a tray, or a handful of kids leaping on the bed to snuggle.
If you had a family, a marriage, then barring major traumas in your history, all these carry terrific weight in the silence. Some of those sounds will only echo down the hallway of your memories unless you bring another family into your too-empty household.
The sounds of people banging around are, for many, loneliness-killers. For me, I delight in having my friendly, funny handyman around. It isn’t just that he’s wonderful company. The sound of work in the house is the sound of human company. As much as I like the natural noises, I also relish the sound of company.
From August 2020 until this year, the only company I’ve had in this big house has been my own, other than workmen.
I also dearly miss the sound of rain on the fly of my tent. I was up in Canada in the Muskwa-Kechika Wilderness in 2019. We were treated to regular early evening showers. There are few sounds I treasure so much as I cuddle in my sleeping bag.
Such sounds along with the sound of owls and night animals put me into the kind of sleep that nearly turns the clock back in my body and brain.
Most solo women campers will tell you that we fear the sound of a big loud truck full of male voices far more than we do the snuffling of some large animal around the tent.
There’s a different kind of silence, too, the kind which leaves people fidgety and bored. Some simply have to have sound on for entertainment. I can’t write with music on, and any kind of entertainment makes composing impossible. Others can’t work without Mozart or Muzak or Motörhead.
Silence is a also great space in which to explore what we’re trying to avoid.
Imagine being Nelson Mandela, twenty-seven years with a great deal of silence in which to investigate one’s self, one’s soul, one’s heart.
He went to prison on Robbins Island as Nelson Mandela.
He came out as Madiba, and changed the course of South African and world history.
That kind of silence, which many experience as boredom, is the silence in which we discover ourselves. That is why nature is so powerful.
That’s why time alone, if we are fortunate enough to have it, is the single finest opportunity to discover what so many of us avoid, run from at full tilt and fill our lives with so much noise to sidestep: time with the soul, with all its painful truths, all its glorious possibilities.
It’s worth a read if this is you. For in our ability to be alone, to be silent, to be comfortable with the thoughts and thorns of our own minds is also our ability to find joy no matter our circumstances.
Life gives and it takes away. All that is external. As Victor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, the ultimate personal power is in our minds, the right to choose how we see and frame things no matter our external circumstances.
I live alone. I love living alone. At times I would love a roommate. At times I love having workman puttering around my house. At times I am intensely lonely. All those feelings float by on the river of life. I do my best not to pick them up and hold onto them, for more feelings are floating down the river towards me.
When I have picked up and held to the awful feelings of loneliness, I have made terrible choices. As have many people dear to me, at great cost. Perhaps that’s why being able to love our own company best, no matter our circumstances, is the journey that protects us most.
In the silence of my mind, it can be a garden of delights or a dungeon of terrors. That is my choice. Being in silence allows me to exercise my ability to choose.
When we discover that we are in the best of company when we are alone, we attract the best of company. Perhaps that’s the greatest lesson of all.
With warm thanks to fellow forest-dweller and Oregonian
for the thoughtful inspiration for this story.Let’s play.
Thank you as always for taking time out of your day to read this. If my writing is valuable to you, please consider
If you know someone who can use this kind of thinking, please also consider
“That’s why time alone, if we are fortunate enough to have it, is the single finest opportunity to discover what so many of us avoid, run from at full tilt and fill our lives with so much noise to sidestep: time with the soul, with all its painful truths, all its glorious possibilities.”
I also consider time alone, a gift. Silence is golden for me as well. Golden in that I treasure my time to look inward or simply to be in the moment.
Such a good read, thank you and much food for contemplation. Thanks too for reminding me of Victor Frankl; what an extraordinary man he was. I have boxes and boxes of unpacked books in my rented house. I so look forward to welcoming them all back once I buy my house! Living with 3 teenagers, I relish the silence when they’re at school but welcome their bustle. It all ebbs and flows. And there are always my dogs to chat to when I need to hear the sound of my own voice!