silence

"why are you so petrified of silence?
here, can you handle this?....................................."
-Alanis Morrisette

a few weeks ago i got a revery. a break. a slight pause on the remote of life.

i had the house to myself. no wife. no kids. the cats had stopped chasing each other and where napping. it started to snow.

i packed myself into a coat and went out into the backyard and sat down. being december, and the height of the capitalism season, it seems that everyone was out and away from their homes. it was silent. very silent. i sat for almost 50 minutes listening to the sound of snowflakes landing on the grass, and in time, on snow.

to me, it was heaven. i didn't just sit, i completely emptied my head, did a little zazen, and enjoyed the silence. both inside and out. i find silence to be the most enjoyable, restful, and fulfilling times in my life. and by silence i mean both inside and out, though more inside than out.

i have come to recognize that this makes me a bit odd to many people. so many people seem to be frightened of silence.

now by this i don't mean that if you walk up to someone and ask them, out of the blue, "what scares you?" that they will turn to you, think a moment, and with fear in their eyes pass up on things like "spiders," or "drowning," or things like that, and say to you, in a shaking voice, "silence!" no, i mean that we show it by our actions.

a great deal of what we do seems to be an attempt to fill up silence, or stillness. how often to ask someone what they are watching on television, and they say that what they are watching isn't any good? so why are they watching it? how often, presented with a chance to do nothing, to rest, to grab a peaceful moment, do we find something to do? how often do we look for things to say to people, in the quiet spaces in life, not because we need to communicate those things, but because we are trying to fill up the silence?

why are we so petrified of silence?

what are we afraid will sneak into our lives if we don't fill it up?

if you think about it, i bet you know someone, likely more than one, who just can't take a moment of silence. someone who will say something, ANYTHING, to just hear the sound of a voice. someone who will turn on the radio if the silence lasts more than 5 seconds, someone who will do anything to avoid a little peace and quiet.

i know someone like that. i am related to someone like that. i will avoid the name, but i still do indeed know them. well.

i am talking about people so scared of a little quiet that they will turn on the TV, the radio AND have a conversation. all at once. all the time. never, ever is a moment allowed be unfilled. noise is what they crave. and the noise never really means anything.

there is a somewhat sarcastic comment made, from time to time, about the "signal to noise" ratio in various parts of daily life. i think it comes from both information theory and radio work. signal refers to the information content, the "important stuff" you might say, while noise simple refers to anything that blocks out the signal, and keeps you from hearing it. i have a sneaking suspicion that the average signal to noise ratio is going down, way down, in the average life. we are doing it to ourselves. on purpose. but why?

well, that is where i get all mystical on you all. i think that when you are silent, what you are really doing is giving your sub-conscious, your right brain, your connection to the collective unconscious, your line to the goddess, your what ever you want to call it, a chance to take over. you are, i think, tapping into a "larger truth." not necessarily because it is a more important truth, though it may be, but because it is a "big picture" kind of truth. a thing happening bit by bit, little by little, building up. the kind of thing that we simply don't notice in our daily lives, in the hustle of life.

but something we notice when we stop, and are quiet. when we listen. when we take the time to silence the laser like fine point part of brain, and let the wider lens of the other part of our minds to tell us what it has pieced together.

and the big picture is not all that rosy.

it is easier, far easier, to make small talk about "that show on the tube last night, did you see it? you know the one!" than to think about the bigger questions, about the meaning of life type of issues. about questions of existence, morality, justice, faith, belief, and truth. there is something in each of us that makes it easier to watch the ripples across the waters surface, than to let the water grow calm, and gaze into the depths, and think about who we really are, what we are really doing, where we are really going. the shallow issues, the surface ripples are so much easier to face. we know that they will be gone in a moment, and that they where of little import. but deeper matters... well, that matters, doesn't it.

...and what if we don't like what we see in the silence?