Music is the silences between the notes.
– – – Claude Debussy
There is a word for the fear of silence. Sedatephobia. It comes from the word “sedate” and the word “phobia.” People who have this syndrome experience anxiety and panic when they’re in quiet surroundings. They fear facing their innermost thoughts and feelings. It’s not about anything on the outside. It’s about what’s happening on the inside.
I know of two kinds of silence. There is the enforced kind. Actor Harvey Firestein says:
“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life. Define yourself.”
Then there is chosen kind: Spiritual leader Wayne Dyer said, “ Everything that is created comes out of
silence. All creativity requires some stillness.”
Fear of silence is like being locked in a room with your harshest critic. The first time I was really alone in my adult life, I had a dream that my doorbell rang and when opened the door, a version of me rushed in and started chasing me around the house. When enough time had gone by and I had mustered the courage to feel good enough about myself to sit in the quiet, the doorbell stopped ringing and I began to welcome the inner peace. Today, I love a good conversation with other people but I also love a good conversation with myself.
I was in my car the other day, listening to a book on Audible, “The Magus,” a classic by bestselling author John Fowles. My attention
was distracted a few times by road work or people crossing the street in front of me with their heads in their phones. My mind wandered, I kept bringing it back, but I became riveted when the narrator read the following:
“The noise was so loud and disruptive, when it stopped, it
felt like an explosion into silence.”
Those words kept repeating in my mind. What a powerful way to talk about something that seemed so indescribable. I began to rewrite a piece I’d been working on that morning. When I was through, I read it out loud. I listened to myself and I became keenly aware of the pauses between the thoughts when I was about to start a new
paragraph. It was a place to rest and get ready to move into the next phase.
I know someone who talks incessantly. My visits with him are getting further and further apart because his constant drone is exhausting. I
do my best to follow the train of thought but I end up shutting down. It’s too much to take in. One evening when we were at dinner, I suddenly became aware of my body and I realized that my mind had been wandering for the last ten minutes. I had no idea what he was talking about. I decided that if I had to disappear in order to tolerate him, there was no reason to have dinner with him.
After many years of living alone, I’ve gained some tools to make it okay to be sit quietly with myself. I practice a Buddhist exercise where you focus on the out breath and you simply allow the in breath to happen. Then you focus on the out breath again. That allows a pause between breaths where you can find peace for a moment. I practice it when I’m in a stressful situation and my mind is working overtime. In traffic. In a doctor’s waiting room. When I’m trying to find a topic for my weekly blog. Conscious breathing helps
me calm my mind and the stress begins to dissipate.
I walk with a friend three times a week and we talk about what’s going on in our lives. We make each other howl with laughter, we discuss our deepest emotions but we also have periods when we don’t speak at all. It makes us feel closer to each other as we both listen to the birds singing and the children playing.
When I teach my Zoom writing classes, I start by leading my
students in a short meditation where they follow their breath and become quiet. It’s only a few minutes but when we come back, something has changed. We’ve had an opportunity to hear ourselves think. We’ve taken a moment to become present, for our minds to stop obsessing and make a smooth channel for the words to come through.
Silence has its own voice. It can be loud enough to override noises like helicopters and garbage trucks and to drown out the inner critic. It also can be quiet enough to soothe us and and invite our creativity to emerge and guide us down an ecstatic path.
Award winning photographer, Ansel Adams, said, “When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
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