On Silence...

I’m in the first week of trying to refine my daily and weekly work process and routine. I had fallen into a rut and am now working to get out of that rut.

One interesting thought: Thank goodness for the rut. Not only has it forced me to make changes, but the changes I’m working on will improve my process and productivity, so a net benefit.

As I’ve gone about acting on this new plan, I am using the Freedom app to help block distracting websites of which I am lucky there are only three for me. It’s working. I recommend it.

And interestingly, on the web portal there is a button that will play coffee shop noises from different cities around the world. It’s nothing more than light banter and espresso machines as white noise. And I wonder, Who needs this?

Then I got to thinking that as writers, we live with a lot of silence. Maybe we listen to music—I do—but we are on our own, in mostly silence.

Then a friend sent this link and this bit really stood out:

“Silence is not the absence of being; it is a kind of being itself. It is not something distant, obtuse, or obscure of which only ascetics and hermits are capable. Most likely we have already experienced deep silence, and now we must feed and free it and allow it to become light within us. We do not hear silence; rather, it is that by which we hear. We cannot capture silence; it must enthrall us. Silence undergirds our very being as ceaseless, primary prayer.

“Silence is a kind of thinking that is not thinking. It is a kind of thinking which truly sees (from the Latin contemplata meaning “to see”). Silence, then, is truly an alternative consciousness. It is a form of intelligence, a form of knowing beyond reacting, which is what we normally call emotion. It is a form of knowing beyond mental analysis, which is what we usually call thinking. Philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) was not wrong when he said, “I think, therefore I am.” He was accurately describing the Western person. Most of us believe that we are what we think, but we are so much more than our thoughts about things.”

I have no larger though, no big epiphany other than to say that as a writer, we must learn to not just access silence of this type, but welcome it and use it to our artistic ends.