Tag: quiet

Sounds of Silence

As we get older, our lives often get quieter. Perhaps at times, even silent. What do we believe about the silence that can surround us during this season?

“Hello darkness my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.” Hauntingly captivating or painfully paralyzing.

When we are younger, silence is often a welcome respite. I remember, raising five children, the times that I found myself alone in my home. I wouldn’t turn on music or do anything that might disturb that glorious sound of nothing.

But today, silence is often a reminder that retreating is no longer necessary. We may even be tempted to run from it, turning on music or picking up our phones. Perhaps we need to look at the quiet and get brave enough to sit with it. The question I try to answer these days is: What is silence holding in her hands? At this season in life, silence still offers us gifts.

1. One of the most important gifts that silence offers us is the space to craft a different narrative, one that will reorient our perspective and point our minds in a more purposeful and hopeful direction. We get influenced all day long by social media, news, family, drama of all types. We can get a sense of heaviness, not realizing how we even go there. It’s good to stop, identify our thoughts, and refocus where necessary.

2. Silence also offers us space to listen to our own heart beat, a heart that we can hear be full of gratitude for another day to lead our bodies in life. We allow (and sometimes force) gratitude to have the loudest voice.

3. Finally, and possibly most important, is the space to connect with God, or Love, or whatever it is that’s bigger than us. Because if we’re the measure of all that there is, our story will consume us. It was never meant to be our yardstick for measuring joy or happiness or contentment. So we stop to breathe deeply, meditate on all that is beautiful, pray. We change perspective.

Silence allows us to hear the deep longing of our own hearts. It’s centering, painful, and hopeful all at once.

I am learning to not only accept the hauntingly captivating beauty of silence; I am learning to embrace her hallowed space. Noise often cobbles together a storyline that’s less than encouraging. Silence allows us to identify the lies we hold about ourselves, especially relative to aging, and craft a story that’s more hopeful. We need that story and so do the people we touch everyday.

“Hello darkness my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.” There’s a lot she has to share with us.

To Be Still

Noise is everywhere. It’s in front of us on our phones, it’s in the background on TV, it’s the constant broadcasting of news, it’s in our heads. Much of the time, it is by choice. Some of the time, we aren’t even aware. Silence is elusive, even when we’re alone.

There is a psalm that begins with, Be still and know. Can we hear our souls begging us to be still? We wonder why our nervous systems are always amped up. We read the warnings about our obsession with social media. But it’s hard to heed the warnings. Because silence scares us.

When dawn is about to break, there is an overwhelming silence around us. The light begins to appear and then the sunrise, and then the quiet beauty of that moment. Can we show up and simply take it in? Often we want to “document” the beauty and so we grab our cameras hoping we can catch a true impression.

When I was staying in Palm Springs, I was able to see the sunrise every morning. On mornings where it was very dramatic, I would walk outside to get a picture. It’s normal to want to take pictures. We want to revisit the moments; we want to share the impression with others.

But what about the impression it longs to leave on our soul?  Dawn comes and goes quickly, and the pictures never quite bring us back to that moment. But the sunrise stamps us every single time.

If beauty is everywhere, I want to show up and leave myself vulnerable to its impression. Noise blocks all that. It’s the beautiful versus the ugly, the stirring versus the settling, the peace versus the agitation.

Every time we witness beauty, every time we wish we had our camera, every time we can’t find words to describe what we saw or felt…let’s consider that maybe it was more about our souls being stamped than it was about being able to show and tell.

Showing up for beauty may start with just one minute of stillness. But it’s a good place to start. Taking a moment to be still and acknowledge the beautiful parts of our day is what’s most helpful in quieting noise, especially the noise in our heads.