They all went to bed four hours ago, so of course they’re asleep.
The living room is a ghost town of abandoned laptops, Xbox controllers, and hoodies. I think this is the first time my apartment has been silent. No… quiet, not silent. The refrigerator hums, the air conditioner grumbles, and my brain, even at this early hour, is filled with a torrent of noise. Quiet is great, but it usually signifies sleep, and my Pavlovian mind can’t quite escape, so there I am, back in my loud and colorful dream that quiet had interrupted.
I jolt back into the silence—no, quiet—and I try to understand the stillness. The mattress creaks as my roommate rolls over in his sleep.
Outside my window, a bird chirps—not sings, just chirps. Birds sing for Annie Dillard, but for me they just make noises. It is amazing what you hear when the TV is off, and everyone is asleep. But when one thing goes silent, you just find another level of sound. I might not hear Master Chief destroying Covenant scum, but I can hear the fridge and the ceiling fan catch up on early morning gossip. Were I to renounce these technologies and flee to Nature, I doubt I would find silence amidst the buzzing, trickling, swaying noises.
And don’t even get me started on my mind—the least silent place of all. Michael Phelps would drown in my raging stream of consciousness.
Quiet takes too much energy. It’s terribly inconvenient, and worst of all, it is seen by our culture as the bastard child of inefficiency. But the human soul needs quiet.—needs to be still and know that God is God. Needs to unhook from the dopamine drips of their phones and ponder themselves.
Do I like who I am when all is quiet?
Quiet doesn’t let you pick and choose who you are, like mobile uploads, or status updates. Quiet takes a Polaroid of the real thing—it may be out of focus, or underdeveloped, but it is unmistakably you.
Rewind three years. It’s somewhere on a road between Santa Fe and Phoenix. The week has been long, and I sit, too exhausted for sleep, attempting to contort my body to the unforgiving structure of a fifteen-passenger van. I lean my head against the window, and by chance look up. Two seconds of looking, and I know I need to get out of that van as soon as possible.
The van has barely stopped moving by the time I am out on the side of the highway, staring up at the brightest web of stars I have ever seen. There's no sound in outer space. The stars never chitchat, never fill time with meaningless ramblings. In the gravel on the interstate shoulder, as tractor trailers roared by, my soul was as quiet as space.
Some people like to watch bugs, or look through microscopes. The tiny worlds they observe make them feel like a god. I don’t want to be God. Why would I want that kind of responsibility? I want to know that God is bigger than me—that there’s more to this universe than my problems. Who would want the pressure of being the center of the universe?
I hold up my thumb and block out a million worlds. I spread my hand and cover a billion more. All these, and I cannot cover every star without covering my own eyes. That kind of greatness gives perspective—a perspective that frees the soul from the nagging need to be in control. It’s an invitation to rest and just be.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago. A regularly scheduled blackout for construction purposes leaves our campus dark for fifteen minutes. As the noisy light recedes, and my eyes adjust to the quietness of the dark, I see stars like I’d never seen before at school. On a good night, you can pick out a few planets, or Orion’s belt, but now the constellations are flooded in an ocean of stars. For a brief moment, I hear the quiet in my soul again. Under the stars, I am a man before his Maker. My ego, my problems, my fears that all swell in the noise of the day—they all shrink in the quiet.
So here I am—back in the living room—with constellations of kicked-off shoes, and the migratory noises of students driving to their early morning classes. And hard as I try, I can’t tune my soul back into quiet—the notes keep sounding sharp and overly taut. I lift my hand and cover the scattered shoes with my palm. My soul can be quiet anywhere. Why do I keep covering my eyes?
Enjoy the post? Comment, share, or like it on facebook...
