Rediscovering Silence: Finding Your Life's Music in a World of Noise

By Will Gray

In an increasingly noisy, distracting world, the idea of enjoying silence—healthy silence—has become for many people just a mirage. We talk about "a little peace and quiet" not because we experience it regularly, but because it's a joke we tell ourselves when we're overwhelmed.

Silence is on the endangered experiences list. Today, if you're like most people, you'll spend 11 hours today in front of screens, interact with your phone more than 2,000 times, and encounter just as many commercial messages. Silence will hardly make any appearances. Certainly not moments of silence you intentionally planned.

From the anechoic chamber of Microsoft's headquarters to the 36 questions that bring people closer together, from John Cage's "4 minutes and 33 seconds" to Yom HaShoah and the sunken place, this book is an adventure in search of an answer: Is it possible to find ourselves again in silence?

The answer is yes. It's not only possible, but crucial, to rediscover silence, and to begin experiencing life less like noise, and more like music.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781734639704

Book preview

REDISCOVERING SILENCE. Copyright © 2020 by Will Gray. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact Shalom for Everyone at shalomforeveryone.com.

FIRST EDITION

Cover art by Brannon McAllister.

eBook ISBN: 978-1-73463-970-4

A disclaimer:

I believe in God, and I love film. In some ways, they’re not inextricably linked to silence, but for me, they’re part of how I understand it.

As a result, both make appearances throughout this book. Whether you connect with them as much as I do, whether you could care less, or whether you’re in the curious middle, you are welcome here.

for Missy

I still hear you in the silence.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Silence is more golden than ever before.

PART ONE: How Silence Got Lost

The Distraction and Noise that Drown Out Silence

The Silent Treatment, from Mansplaining to Genocide

Silent Betrayal and the Sloth of Silence

Deprivation: When Silence Becomes Too Much

Vulnerability and the Feeling of Unreadiness

PART TWO: Where to Find Yourself in Silence

Listening, the Personal Copernican Revolution

Canvas, Constraints, and the Power of the Unconscious

Respect and the Generous Act of Silent Mode

Rest and the Healing Powers of Silence

Answers We Receive, and Answers We (Should) Give

Anticipation and Living in the In-Between

Bypass: Silence in the Life, Death, and Afterlife of Jesus

Wonder and the Ennobling Experience of the Extraordinary

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHAPTER NOTES

Introduction

Silence is more golden than ever before.

In the opening moments of the 1997 sci-fi film Contact, the title enters the screen silently, fades to blue and disappears into black.¹

Then, suddenly, there’s a hideous burst of sound. A sonic explosion.

As our ears strain under the aural whiplash, we realize: even though we’re hearing an explosion, we’re not looking at one. We’re looking at the Earth, just close enough to see its colorful marble against the backdrop of space. That hideous burst of sound is a blender-full of pop songs, and they’re loud and intense. Semi-Charmed Life, by Third Eye Blind. Wannabe by the Spice Girls. God Shuffled His Feet by the Crash Test Dummies.

Then, almost imperceptibly at first, we begin to back away from the Earth. As we do, the songs start to get older. Funkytown. Purple People Eater. We hear Richard Nixon insist, I am not a crook, and Neil Armstrong announce his first steps on the moon.

Then the Earth fades from view, on the other side of an asteroid belt and Mars. The noise blips and scrambles for a moment, but as we continue moving backward, farther and farther, the sound re-emerges. We hear even earlier songs, radio, broadcast political speeches, until our galaxy itself comes into view, and then beyond. The Eagle Nebula, looking as it does like a cloudy parent helping a young cloud child in its first steps.

By this point, there is no more sound. And yet, we continue to travel backward. Galaxies and nebulae themselves now seem numerous and small as stars. Backward, backward. Silence, and yet more silence. Until we hear a young girl’s voice, and the galaxy-stars of space coalesce into a macro view of her iris.

Without a single word of dialogue, we’ve been immersed into a breathtaking view of the universe. We’ve also been introduced to an idea: there’s an intricate relationship—and even limits—between us as people and the universe where we live. That relationship can be understood through sound and through silence.

Sound happens.

You may have never considered this idea before, that sound moves out from Earth and into space.² In reality, it doesn’t proceed very far before the lack of atmosphere lets the sound waves drop between its fingers. But if we could imagine for a moment, this intro sequence from Contact may have something to tell us through its fanciful astronomy.

Imagine a geographical (make that astronomical) map of sound and silence, a line or web that stretches from the sounds you’re hearing right now all the way out to the first sounds ever made in this universe. Imagine for a moment that we could travel into space, following the threads of these sounds, and that we could venture past the ranges of even the earliest broadcasts. The sounds would be fainter, smaller, but if we listened closely enough, we might hear the battle cries of Napoleon and Genghis Khan, the earthquake at the crucifixion of Jesus, and the public performance of Euripides’ plays.

If we traveled far enough, pressing far past the speed of light, we might even reach the first poem from Adam to Eve, the music of the spheres, the fluttering rush of trees as they first burst out of the ground, the audible stretch of space, the first sounding of the voice of God (just before the light exploded), the whir of the Spirit hovering above the face of the waters, the silence of unformed darkness. The silence.

In this vision of history, our countless sounds have pushed out from Earth like ten trillion canoes into a lake with only one shore. Sound happens, we might say, and it happens simply from humans living their lives, and from things being made.

Silence is golden.

Yet even though sound happens all the time, many of us might still wonder why we call silence golden as a result. What’s so golden about it? Or is this just a pointless phrase, one of those old wives’ sayings, now caught in the amber of permanent nostalgia?

After all, not all of our experiences with silence have been positive. It’s even possible that you think of silence as something scary, elusive, or mythical. You may long for a little peace and quiet, but be clueless about what to do with it when it’s finally in your grasp. Or you may relish silence, but remain convinced that it’s something achievable on only the rarest of occasions.

Here’s what I hope to convince you of as you journey through this book: silence is golden. Not just because it’s valuable and rare—though, boy howdy, can it be valuable and rare. (The wonderful news is that it’s just as valuable when it ceases to be rare.) It’s also not golden just because it’s a luxury. By the end of this book, I hope you’ll see it’s far more than that.

Silence is a gold that’s meant for everyday use, just as a wedding ring both symbolizes and signals a unique, committed relationship set apart from any other. In that sense, your marriage is rare, and yet everyday. Equally, our experience of silence can be like the golden audio jacks on high-end stereo equipment, since gold is one of the finest conductive materials. It helps energy to find its way to where it needs to go, and helps to turn that energy into music. I don’t know about you, but I could benefit from something this valuable and rare, a luxury that becomes part of my everyday experience, something that welcomes me in to collaborate with it, and then helps me make the most of my energy. Perhaps that sounds intriguing to you, too.

Above all, as we continue, I hope to convince you that silence is not an absence. It’s not simply the lack of sound. Silence is an entity, and it is a gift.

Along these lines, there’s a joke about a man caught in a flood. He’s an atheist, but decides this is a good time to start praying. So he looks skyward and pleads, God, if you’re real, save me from drowning!

Soon after, a neighbor paddles up in a canoe. Hop aboard!

I can’t, says the man. I’m waiting for God to rescue me.

The neighbor shrugs his shoulders and paddles on.

Then the police come by in a boat. Get in, they say. We’ll take you to safety.

No thanks, says the man. I’m waiting for God to rescue me.

Soon the waters have risen high enough that the man has to crawl on his roof. He’s still praying, but also becoming increasingly skeptical.

He hears a whirring noise and peers up to see a helicopter descending, a rope dangling down toward him. He waves them off, mouthing something they can’t hear because the noise of the blades is too loud. But you know what it is.

Not too long after, the man drowns. He arrives at the pearly gates, which is how all jokes like this go. And when he arrives, he demands to speak with God immediately. So he’s ushered into God’s throne room, where he starts to bellyache. If you’re real, which it sure looks like you are, why didn’t you answer my prayers and rescue me?

Here’s the thing, God says. I sent you my canoe, my police boat, and my helicopter, and you didn’t get into any of them.

In this admittedly ridiculous story, these prayers into the silence are being answered. They float into the silence like one of Contact’s audible canoes and, even though what arrives back out of the silence is misunderstood, it is in fact a gift, a series of gifts—though the man doesn’t realize it at the time.

The gift of silence

In a similar way, it’s my firm belief that silence is a gift in our lives, too, one that we similarly fail to recognize on a daily basis, no matter how impassionedly we plead for it. When I call it a gift, I mean that in both senses of the word: it is a present, and it is a capacity.

First, it is possible to see silence as a wrapped-up present, a perk we’re invited to accept on a regular basis, as if every day is our birthday. If we can come to see silence in this way, as something given to us, it can also feel extremely given as a result. We can relax about our obsessions to manufacture it, and start receiving it instead. The silence we long to be given is a part of shalom, that true peace and quiet we all crave. It’s a calm both outside of us and inside us too.

Second, silence involves our capacity to find it, to value it, and even to use it. In fact, if we don’t have the capacity for silence, we’ll miss it just as often and just as surely as the man in the flood. If this leads you to despair; if you’re fearing that the capacity for silence is like the gift of perfect pitch or a photographic memory (something you don’t possess), remember the first meaning of silence as gift. Knowing where to look for silence? That’s an ability in itself. Knowing what to do with it once you’ve found it? That’s a talent worth cultivating. Thankfully, the ability to find and harness silence isn’t only the domain of gurus, monks, and horse whisperers. Becoming able to interact with silence is a gift we all can exercise, a capacity we all can strengthen. That’s why this book