Music\u00a0is the silences between the notes.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0– – – Claude Debussy<\/p>\n
There is a word for the fear of silence. Sedatephobia. It\u00a0comes from the word \u201csedate\u201d and the word \u201cphobia.\u201d People who have this\u00a0syndrome experience anxiety and panic when they\u2019re in quiet surroundings. They\u00a0fear facing their innermost thoughts and feelings. It\u2019s not about anything on\u00a0the outside. It\u2019s about what\u2019s happening on the inside.<\/p>\n
I know of two kinds of silence. There\u00a0is the enforced kind. Actor Harvey Firestein says:<\/p>\n
\u201cNever be bullied into silence.\u00a0Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one\u2019s definition of your\u00a0life. Define yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then there is chosen kind:\u00a0Spiritual leader Wayne Dyer said, \u201c Everything that is created comes out of
\u00a0silence. All creativity requires some stillness.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fear of silence is like being\u00a0locked in a room with your harshest critic. The first time I was really alone\u00a0in my adult life, I had a dream that my doorbell rang and when opened the\u00a0door, a version of me rushed in and started chasing me around the house. When\u00a0enough time had gone by and I had mustered the courage to feel good enough\u00a0about myself to sit in the quiet, the doorbell stopped ringing and I began to welcome\u00a0the inner peace. Today, I love a good conversation with other people but I also\u00a0love a good conversation with myself.<\/p>\n
I was in my car the other day, listening to a book on\u00a0Audible, \u201cThe Magus,\u201d a classic by bestselling author John Fowles. My attention
was distracted a few times by road work or people crossing the street in front\u00a0of me with their heads in their phones. My mind wandered, I kept bringing it\u00a0back, but I became riveted when the narrator read the following:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe noise was so loud and disruptive, when it stopped, it
felt like an explosion into silence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those words kept repeating in my mind. What a powerful way\u00a0to talk about something that seemed so indescribable.\u00a0I began to rewrite a piece I\u2019d been working on that morning.\u00a0When I was through, I read it out loud. I listened to myself and I became keenly\u00a0aware 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.<\/p>\n
I know someone who talks incessantly. My visits with him are\u00a0getting 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\u2019s too\u00a0much to take in. One evening when we were at dinner, I suddenly became aware of\u00a0my body and I realized that my mind had been wandering for the last ten\u00a0minutes. I had no idea what he was talking about. I decided that if I had to\u00a0disappear in order to tolerate him, there was no reason to have dinner with\u00a0him.<\/p>\n
After many years of living alone, I\u2019ve gained some tools to\u00a0make it okay to be sit quietly with myself. I practice a Buddhist exercise\u00a0where you focus on the out \u00a0breath and you simply allow the in breath to happen.\u00a0Then 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\u2019m in a stressful\u00a0situation and my mind is working overtime. In traffic. In a doctor\u2019s waiting\u00a0room. When I\u2019m trying to find a topic for my weekly blog. Conscious breathing helps
me calm my mind and the stress begins to dissipate.<\/p>\n
I walk with a friend three times a week and we talk about\u00a0what\u2019s going on in our lives. We make each other howl with laughter, we discuss\u00a0our deepest emotions but we also have periods when we don\u2019t speak at all. It\u00a0makes us feel closer to each other as we both listen to the birds singing and\u00a0the children playing.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0It\u2019s only a few minutes but when we come back, something has changed. We\u2019ve had\u00a0an opportunity to hear ourselves think. We\u2019ve taken a moment to become present,\u00a0for our minds to stop obsessing and make a smooth channel for the words to come\u00a0through.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Award winning photographer, Ansel Adams, said, \u201cWhen images become\u00a0inadequate, I shall be content with silence.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Music\u00a0is the silences between the notes. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0– – – Claude Debussy There is a word for the fear of silence. Sedatephobia. It\u00a0comes from the word \u201csedate\u201d and the word \u201cphobia.\u201d People who have this\u00a0syndrome experience anxiety and panic when they\u2019re in quiet surroundings. They\u00a0fear facing their innermost thoughts and feelings. It\u2019s not about anything […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2760,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2761"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2762,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2761\/revisions\/2762"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}