I learned something today about the sound of quiet. Life is noisy, isn’t it? For me, it gets way too noisy. Remember the saying. . . can’t see the forest for the trees, an expression used of someone who is too involved in the details of a problem to see the big picture. . .?
Well, often, I can’t hear the message for the chatter.
Turn off the bloody noise.
And I must extend the metaphor to the digital noise we encounter while trying to get something done online. I can’t see my project for all the advertisements flashing by me. Right now, messages are coming in on my phone, begging for my attention.
Oh, oh, the timer on the stove. Yikes. Give me a break.
Though Facebook seems to be a necessary evil at the moment, I predict that in the end, the endless and constant digital droning, mental, social, nonsensical noise will do it in– if it doesn’t do us in first.
For my holistic self, a work in progress, to say the least, I have not yet found a way to work in that noisy environment, although I allude to a, sometimes, very helpful type of music from Wholetones under Reviews. However, in the midst of too many outside distractions, I find it difficult to produce anything meaningful.
I knew it, already, that “silence is golden.” Do you feel it? And there is something to recognizing that feeling. But today, I wanted to put together a few words about “the art of silence” in relation to optimal performance, really, no matter what you’re performing.
Turn off the noise.
No need to give the ethereal nature of quiet a description, or a name, and hopefully not to detract from its etherealism (new word?) by making it tangible.
Because, really, the above photo does not feel tangible. Does it? It is, however, an example of how one might miss the forest for the trees. But don’t you feel better just looking at it?
Suddenly, I had to go listen to and read all the words to one of my absolute favorite songs: The Sounds of Silence. I wanted, somehow, to weave it into this discussion. The song is melancholy, and it is beautiful. I love melancholy. I don’t know why– There is a touch of melancholy in so many beautiful things, beauty so exquisite, it hurts, like crying for joy. Sometimes sadness is beautiful. Is that not strange? Beautiful words touch me and Paul Simon.
As it turns out: his message is nothing like mine. It makes a different point. Oh well, I just gave you a perfect example of getting off track while you’re working, and I didn’t even have any outside distractions, other than the ones in my head, to do it.
All of us, at some point in time, have found ourselves in a quiet space. How did it feel? Did you know how to feel, or did you want to feel? Quiet might have seemed strange at first. I remember a time when it did, or even times when it still does.
Ah, the noisy fan in my furnace just went off. Silence. Tick, tock. The wonder of it all.
Unlike the meaning locked into the beautiful poetry of Simon and Garfunkel, consider silence as a tool from which to gain multiple benefits. I think what I am trying to say here is, in a holistically healthy life, which by definition, pertains to the whole me and the whole you: 1) quiet can help us tune into the right side of our brains, the side that gets things done in a linear and orderly fashion. 2) And on the other side of the men are from Mars and women are from Venus argument, perhaps, we can tap into our creative side at the same time. Creative productivity. What more could anyone want? And that is one example of whole person health.