The Catastrophe of Noise

It can be hard to find places where we feel truly at ease. To feel at ease, we have to feel safe, and to feel safe requires some combination of nameable and unnameable elements that we don’t always know how to locate or sustain. We all have this primal orientation towards ease which means we’re all constantly trying to avoid danger. This is easier said than done when there’s such a constant cascade of stimulation to take in and assess.

Everyone enters this life with a bone-deep desire for an encompassing sense of safety. That desire never goes away and, if anything, grows stronger as we learn more about what is to be alive and what can happen to a person along the way. Safety is so much more than an emotional preference; our bodies are literally healthier when we spend more time in the physiological state of feeling safe, when there’s ease flowing through our veins. What’s intriguing, and somewhat tragic, about us humans is that we seem to be inclined to constantly conflate feeling safe with being comfortable. As a result of this conflation we find ourselves all too often on one side or the other of so much struggle and harm and distress.

Safety and comfort are two distinctly different ways of feeling and they don’t always come together. The former is a survival instinct, a form of self-preservation; the latter is a privilege. They are both worthy pursuits and there’s no shame in wanting both but if we don’t learn to discern between them we’re left interpreting any lack of comfort as a lack of safety. And from there so much panic and impulsivity are likely to ensue.

Pretty early on in the beautifully instructive book, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” by Robin Wall Kimmerer, the author asks herself, and thereby asks each of us, this question: In one short life where does the responsibility lie? She poses a lot of striking and essential questions throughout the many mesmerizing pages and all of them somehow point back to this underlying idea of responsibility and, relatedly, reciprocity.

When a person, or a society, changes how it thinks, its behavior will naturally change accordingly. We can’t keep doing one thing and saying another. We can’t keep trying to have it both ways: our gas-guzzling cars and our green new deal; our curated avatar selves and a calm sense of identity. And when we talk about changing the way we think we have to understand that means changing our relationship to how we feel.

We have to unlearn so much chronic intellectualizing and what-if’ing so we’re free to create the space and silence that will allow us to become attuned to another part of ourselves where the doubt recedes and we find a truer sense of knowing. You might call this part of yourself intuition, heart, or spirit. Name it whatever you like, but spend more time listening to it before it’s too late.

Language is such a beautiful thing. I was drawn to it as a very young child and that passion has only grown as I’ve gotten older. I studied writing in school, I spend time reading and writing every day, and I do work that is rooted in dialogue. And yet this is perhaps why I am keenly aware, after many years and hours of reflection, that language — like all forms of expression — is as limited as it is powerful. Where the power of language (written, spoken, sung) begins to wane, we must have other things. But so often it seems that we don’t.

Human beings seem to have an almost reflexive fear of silence. We seem to fear that something bad or scary exists in those intervals without sound. But when we look at our most ubiquitous and agonizing (societal and individual) problems we can almost always trace them back to one central issue: We think and talk too much. We listen and rest too little.

Our brains, and therefore our bodies, are exhausted by this incessant internal and external barrage of communications. When we feel this exhaustion, the tendency is typically to think it through, to talk it out. This is akin to using the batteries with the least amount of voltage to power the biggest appliance for the most urgent task. That is to say, this tendency is working against us.

We have been propagandized and conditioned to do the opposite of what our nature requires. These human nervous systems that we’re all miraculously graced with will plague us when we ignore their feedback. We use words like “anxious” and “depressed” and “irritable” to describe how we feel when we’re so tired from all the thinking and all the talking. But we fail to see that if our big brilliant brains are the parts that have become fatigued then they’re the parts we have to rest. In an attention-economy where way too many insidious forces are constantly vying for our time, rest can seem elusive or, to some, a waste of time. But to what end do we keep going at this punishing pace?

If you’re up for taking advantage of any opportunity to rest the parts of you that have been depleted, the question becomes one of how. To get healing rest–the kind where our bodies become settled and get that visceral, unmissable feeling of ease–our best bet is to spend more time in silence.

“Quiet is quieting,” says the acoustic ecologist/silence activist Gordon Hempton.

Silence is relative and we all have a different sense of it. But we know when it’s there and we know when it’s not. If we were to practice, every day, becoming very still and quiet, we would find the path to the silence that we need. Our bodies are wiser in some ways than our minds; our bodies house the map to get out of the chaos but some degree of quiet is required so the focus can remain on that sacred navigation. Just because the mind can think doesn’t mean it always should. We have to do our best to learn how to turn the volume down on the static (within and without) so the intelligence within us can take over and do its work. Anything less and we’re just going to collapse.

There are many lovely metaphors for this inner quieting. My favorite is from The Buddha who described the body in meditation as a tree and the mind as a dancing monkey who keeps trying to stray away from the groundedness, distracted all the time by every passing shiny thing, so the breath becomes the thing that brings the monkey back, over and over. Eventually, the monkey will learn that it’s not worth running away and will sit down beside the tree and allow everything to be quiet and still for a while.

Richard Powers writes, in “The Overstory,” (one of the best books I’ve ever read): “Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics.

If we could see green….If we could understand green….If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn’t have to choose between the Earth’s interests and ours. They’d be the same!”

Many, though not all, of the remaining (relatively) silent places on Earth exist among trees (there are currently only 12 of these according to Gordon Hempton). These primordial green creatures seem to be here to show and tell us that something, something that some special humans seem to believe could save our lives.

Whatever the trees are trying to tell us, we — humans — need to hear it.

But we’ll never hear the trees, we’ll never see or understand green, unless we learn to be in silence, even when it’s uncomfortable (maybe sometimes especially then). There is safety in silence, the possibility of any variation of what might happen next and a surrender to the vastness of a single present moment. There will not always be ease in silence, at first or in every circumstance, but there will be safety, safety from the catastrophe of so much meaningless noise.

You can start taking time for silence right now. Head outside with no headphones and walk among the silence that rolls into the empty spaces. If that’s not possible then close your eyes right where you are and breathe slowly for a little while, until you hear the silence. Or you might designate and decorate a corner of your home where there are soft objects and soothing smells and then allow yourself to sit there, today and every day, and take a moment of silence.

What if we all took a daily moment of silence….for all that’s happened and all that will, for everything and everyone we’re grateful for, for everything we’ve survived, for everyone who’s suffering and for anyone who’s lost, for the child that lives in your own heart, the little you that never needed to ‘make time for silence’ because our child-selves were wiser in that way, they knew the need for silence like they knew the cue for hunger and they never ignored it and they reveled in it whenever it arrived.

What if we became those children again, be-wildered, re-wilding ourselves in the woods and at the lakeshores, in our books and films and music, in how we talk to each other and how we talk to ourselves, making more time to play and imagine, crowding out the dread and despair? What if we each took off the mask that keeps us thinking we’re “someone who doesn’t know how to slow down?”

What if we learned how to see green? What if all our what-ifs were a little bit hopeful and rooted, like a tree, in the fact of the miracle of our existence on this planet in this moment, unlikely and improbable as this whole thing is?

It’s been a balanced exchange:

I worked on the pond

and the pond worked on me,

and together we made a good home.

(from “Braiding Sweetgrass”)