The Value of Silence in an Uncertain World

Essay

You’d think in the Time of Covid I would be scrambling to listen to music, to soothe myself with rock, classical, new age. Anything to distract from the nagging fear looming over my shoulder that the person at work not wearing a mask is going to infect me, and with my high risk status, I’m a goner despite MY mask. Music should give solace to my uptight brain. 

It didn’t work out that way. 

Sometimes I listen to 70’s and 80’s rock going to and from work. It’s mindless, it reminds me of childhood, some songs are even uplifting. It gets me through the commute without too many four-letter words. But at home or on walks, I listen to the silence. The hum of the refrigerator, the whir of a fan. Birds chirping outside the window. The wind roaring through the trees. (Wyoming has some hellacious winds, up to 35mph on a normal day. No pleasant breeze here.)  On a walk, I hear my footsteps. Children shrieking on the playground. The growl of an untuned truck engine. Easy enough to let fade into the background. 

Silence has value. 

Experience has taught me that silence is a part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. Proneness to exaggerate, to suppress or modify the truth, wittingly or unwittingly, is a natural weakness of man, and silence is necessary in order to surmount it. 

Gandhi

It provides balance to a world beset by noise, 24/7. The world shoves itself in your face, demanding to be heard, looked at. Feared. Nonstop news, advertising, all demanding my attention. I feel the uncertainty I carry receding as I chose to turn off the tv, shut down the computer, and pick up a book. Or weave. Or carve a woodblock. 

Silence has energy.

“You will at once feel your senses gather themselves together; they seem like bees which return to the hive and there shut themselves up to work without effort or care on your part. 

St. Teresa

It recharges my mental batteries and relaxes my body. My mind slows down. I hear and see things I’d ordinarily pass over. As a writer, that’s a prize. As a human, it’s precious. We’ve forgotten how to find peace in our lives. Peace brings balance. The hardest thing to do is turn off the running dialogue in your head. Without the constant uproar, ideas percolate unrestrained. Poems sing through your head. Connections are made from unconnected thoughts. 

As a writer, who wouldn’t want that?

Scientifically, it helps your brain and overall health. If it all sounds very Zen, it is. And it isn’t. Each religion has a special place for silence in its practice. But you don’t need religion to help you find silence in reflection. Just a willingness to step away from the world, to disconnect for a little while. It’s hard at first, but nothing gets easier without practice. Practice being yourself. Silence can teach you that.

Listen to silence. It has so much to say. 

Rumi

The Renaissance Woman Today

Essay

I can’t be good at everything

Imagine my surprise when I came to this realization. Society says we should strive for perfection in all things. To boldly go where no writer/artist/knitter/printer has gone before. To be different, unique. Special. 

Fine and dandy, but I call bullshit. 

Extroverts and Type A personalities run the world. They push. And push. More, better, faster. I bought in to it. When you already operate from a brain that is attention deficient, what are a few more things to rattle around up there? A busload of screaming kids, all clamoring for attention. You get used to the noise and disarray. It took a good long while before I realized I didn’t want to get used to the racket, especially racket of my own making. 

In my arrogance, I thought I could juggle all the balls and be equally good at everything. It took a few clues landing on my head with a thunk to realize I’m not. I’m not good at everything. And I don’t need to be. It’s not a race against the world to reach the top. It’s not a death march up Everest. 

With realization came planning.

What could I let go of? All the juggling balls don’t have equal weight. What was important to me? Important enough to want to hang on to that, and not something else. Creating was important, but what did that look like? I had way too many hobbies, I needed to let go of some. I did, but I still haven’t let go of the material things surrounding the hobby. One step at a time. Into storage with them.

Writing stayed. It had to. It’s part of me. Novels, poems, and essays. Trying to write short stories and flash fiction went by the wayside, they are not my strong points. I’m well rounded enough without them, although it was hard to tell myself that. Write all the things! That’s what I used to believe.

Printmaking stayed. I have a deep-seated love of the smell of ink and the creation of an image on paper rolled through a press or rubbed by hand. I kept watercolors and drawing pads to create ideas for prints, and to see if an image would be better suited to another medium than printmaking. It’s hard to let go of some types of art. I’m never going to be the kind of watercolor painter I wanted to be, acceptance of that made my painting better as I found my own methods.

Knitting and weaving. There’s something about the tactile nature of knitting and weaving that appeals to me. The creation of something practical, useable. The design of a pair of colorwork mittens, a hat, or table runners is a meditative experience. Seeing the design come to life is gratifying. Knitting and weaving stay. They get pushed to the side sometimes, but they stay in my repertoire. 

Everything else that stays is for a practical reason. I no longer design websites, except my own. Sewing is for masks and quilts, but it’s for fun when I feel so moved. Photography has mostly gone, except for practical stuff. I majored in it, I shouldn’t let it go, but the truth is I loved working with a Rolleiflex camera and its square format, and a 4×5 camera with its huge negatives I developed myself. Now that the world is digital, it’s really hard to work with old-style negatives and development. It was another meditative experience swept away by point and click. I still have the old cameras, just in case. 

I really wanted to be a Renaissance woman. I don’t think it’s possible anymore. That’s okay, the last thing someone needs is to pressure themselves into scattered interests with no time to improve them all. I can’t be perfect at everything, but I can do some things to my own satisfaction. Most days, that’s enough.

Advice Paralysis

Essay / Writing

How’s your writing going? How’s your quarantine going? How are you doing today? 

I finally identified my current writing problem. Instruction fatigue that leads to paralysis. I’m editing a novel as I try to write more poetry. I’m using search and replace to search and destroy insidious words. Good advice I read somewhere. Normally, I would embrace what I can use, discard the rest. I enjoy helpful advice. 

Usually.

Since all the writers are stuck at home, advice is gushing out to blogs and writing sites like water from a fire hose. Everyone has the time to advise right now. “Write All The Things!” Advice flies at me every time I open my email or browse to my favorite sites. At first, it seemed good. I gulped the gushing water. Then I tried to apply it to my own work. That’s when I choked. Contradictions rattled in my brain. Do this, not that. Do that, not this. Write, no, write more. Wear a mask. Wear two masks. Wrap duct tape around your face and wear a welding shield. Don’t touch your face. Don’t touch anything. Don’t breathe, it’s safer. But despite that, write. 

Tons of articles appeared on how to use this stay at home time to your advantage, most of them exhorting you to not waste time and get that Great American Novel (or Poem) in the works. Sort of NaNoWriMo, the Pandemic Version. It can guilt-trip people frozen in place by everyday fears—money, food, rent, worry about loved ones. The numbered “C” that has replaced the Big C. Getting through the day seems more important than getting Sylvia out of the murder house and on the run for her life. 

It’s a dystopian novel that sprung to life. Kudos to those who can keep plugging on despite the looming end of the world as we know it. (Too much?) I struggle to do any real editing of my novel, other than nit-picky stuff—eradicating weasel words like “that” and “would”. My poetry has undertones of despair. Even a poem about a flower ends with its death. I’m afraid to edit previous work because of this. I’m trying to pull up my bootstraps and accept writing isn’t coming from a happy place right now.

I don’t want to journal. Meditating is not the answer to all problems. Hurtling an asteroid into Earth seems like a good place to end a sci-fi novel.

Must Not Give In To Annihilating Humanity. 

Find inspiration where you can. Don’t worry if you can’t. 

That’s all I’ve got right now. I venture out the door to my “essential” (sacrificial) job with the public that leaves me fearful I’ve caught coronavirus every time I leave at five. That I’ve brought it home to my family. Writing needs to be a safe space. Not swallowing the fire hose of advice is now refuge from my tendency to beat myself up over not producing more, since I’m stuck in the house when I’m not at work. 

Advice is a sign of the times. It’s a cozy blanket fort offered up as salve to our burning fears. It wants to distract us from the underlying terror that something bad is going to happen and we’re helpless to stop it. I like to be in control of my world and damn it, the world is spinning out of control. I’m embracing the paralysis by easing away from social media and the news. I’m baking bread. Writing ideas in a notebook with my favorite pen. Petting the dog. Reading everything I can get my hands on. Paralysis retreats inch by inch. By the weekend, I’m ready to write again and send my plaintive “How are you doing today?” out into the world once more. 

The Pandemic Avoider’s Guide to Caution

Essay

I started out smug. Coronavirus can’t get me, I don’t associate with people all that much. My faithful muse smacked me on the back of the head. Fool, said she.

I’m not as introverted as I think. 

Being in the high risk group makes me very cautious. Even my other half worries about bringing something home. But there is another problem. Besides having no baseball to distract me. 

I work with the public. And the higher-ups show no sign of letting us do much work by phone or Internet. A lot can be done that way. We have hand sanitizer on desks and by phones. We’re as careful as we can be, but wiping down computers and phones and desks with Clorox does nothing about the people that come in sniffling and sneezing. We hand them masks. They hand us paperwork from their germy hands. I’m tempted to spray it down with Lysol, but doing it in front of them is a bridge I haven’t crossed. Yet. Pens, packages, the door handles. I wash my hands once an hour. Is that enough? More soap? Lye?

My other half goes to the grocery store for us. Wiping down the cart handles is fine, but what about the can someone took off the shelf and then put back? Things that are exchanged and replaced? Will flour ever be back in stock? How many meals can one make with hamburger? This is the time hoarding tendencies come in handy. Plenty of food in the freezer, art supplies, and yarn to knit. But limited TP and hand sanitizer. Rinsing hands in vodka seems excessive. At the moment. Better put to use with orange juice.

Everything that can be closed, is closed. I get gas with gloves on. The gym is closed now. I’m hoping stretches and dumbbells at home will do for the time being. My dog is too old to walk, but my neighborhood is empty for me to roam the road. We walkers wave at each other from opposite sides of the street. Advantages of living out of town.

How much avoidance is acceptable? How much further does an introvert have to go to be safe? Is there no safe place? Probably not. Unless you want to disconnect entirely from the public and live like a hermit. Even then, if your groceries get delivered, who handled them? There’s no winning. I’ve gone with sanitizer, wipes, and avoiding gatherings, but even introverts need human contact more than they think. On the plus side, I have lots of time to edit the novel, read, and create new poetry. 

All we can do is our best. Don’t let the possibilities overwhelm you. Watch Netflix or Prime or the Weather Channel. (Highway Thru Hell is my guilty pleasure.) Quit picking your nose. Try not to run screaming when someone around you coughs. Take precautions, but don’t wear a HazMat suit. Yet. Introvert, but don’t let it consume you.

In the words of Sergeant Phil Esterhaus, “Let’s be careful out there.”

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