Making space for silence (also known as, why we should all spend more time under trees)
Today, I was hanging the washing in silence. It was an unusual thing. Not the hanging the washing bit; the other part — the silence. Usually, I have a squeaky little helper next to me, singing, asking questions, or making unreasonable demands. And I’ve found that I’m not the only one who normally doesn’t hang washing in silence. A good friend told me that she always listens to podcasts when she’s doing things around the house. My husband always listens to music.
As I stood there in silence today, hanging the clothes, it struck me that both I and the people around me don’t have enough silence in our lives.
This topic — making space for silence — struck me as a nice follow on for the blog I recently wrote on making space for incidental inspiration. So, after the washing was hung, I came upstairs and did a quick google search on “the importance of silence.”
I found more articles than I had expected. Many of them were too esoteric and didn’t really resonate, but then I found this one, by Harvard Business Review, which was pretty great.
The article lists a bunch of influencers and intellects — from JK Rowling to Bill George — who describe periods of silence as important factors in their success.
It cites numerous studies which show that taking time for silence “restores the nervous system, helps sustain energy, and conditions our minds to be more adaptive and responsive to the complex environments in which so many of now live, work and lead.”
The article also includes this quote, by Hal Gregersen, which resonated very strongly — “[cultivating silence] increase[s] your chances of encountering novel ideas and information and discerning weak signals.”
On discovering this article, I concluded that I didn’t, in fact, need to write my own piece; this one already said all of the things I could have hoped to say.
But then I read on and reached a point in the article where I felt it veered off track. While the article makes a very compelling case about why silence is important, I feel that it — and many of the other articles I read — offer poor advice about how to achieve more silence.
The article offers four practical ideas for “cultivating periods of sustained quiet time”:
1. Punctuate meetings with five minutes of quiet time
2. Take a silent afternoon in nature
3. Go on a media fast
4. Take the plunge and try a meditation retreat.
Now, don’t get me wrong. These are all great ideas. But they all require adding something to your usual routine. And I think this is completely unnecessary.
This is because I think that we all already have so many opportunities in our lives to hold silence and sit with it. Instead, we choose to fill it.
We go for a run, but instead of running in silence, we listen to music.
We sit on the tube, but rather than sitting in silence, we listen to a podcast.
We cook, but rather than being alone with our thoughts and the ingredients, we call a friend, or turn on the radio.
The list goes on.
The fact is, there are so many points in our lives every day where silence could feature. We choose for it not to. We turn on the TV. We jump on social media. We read something. We feed our minds constantly.
We consume like this for many reasons: because we feel it enriches us; or relaxes us; or distracts us; or entertains us.
But our minds need a break. The studies say so, and it feels so intuitively true. How can we possibly process and make the most of all of the stuff we’re feeding into our brains if we never consciously give ourselves time to process and ruminate and reflect on of all of the input?
I remember when I had my first baby. The doctors and nurses tell you stimulation is important. You need to chat to your baby, sing to it, read to it, show it contrasting colours. I’m sure all of this is true. But I remember my mum coming over one warm day, when my baby was a couple of months old, and suggesting that I lay him on a rug, outside, by himself, under a birch tree. That’s what her mother taught her to do.
I took my little man and placed him under that tree. It was just him, and the breeze, and the shadows that the spindly limbs of the tree were casting over his naked body. Within moments, he was kicking his legs, moving his arms, and cooing like I hadn’t heard him coo before. He was alone, with no one smiling at him or squeaking one of those annoying Sophie giraffes in his face, and he was so damn happy.
From then on, I put all three of my children under trees, a lot. I still try to, though they’re less amenable to it now.
Silence is important. That appears to be surprisingly well known.
What I’m trying to add to this conversation is the idea that we don’t need a meditation retreat to introduce silence into our lives.
We could run without music.
We could sit on the tube without a podcast.
We could cook without a friend on the other end of the phone.
We could all be making small choices every day to carve out more time for silence. And we’d almost certainly all be a bit better off if we did.
