Here in the Stillness

**I wrote this blog post in late summer/ early autumn of 2019.  I had no idea that in just a few short months everything would change and I would be spending so much time at home.

I'm trying something a little different today.  Lately I've been having trouble writing posts for the blog.  Every time I sit down to write, something comes up to distract me.  It's maddening.  So, today I've invested in a nice pair of ear plugs and I'm testing them out in a room filled with booming music and chattering family members.

 

The world we live in today is filled with distraction, filled with noise.  To tell the truth, I hate it.  I always have.  Even as a child I wasn't the sort to constantly have the television on, music playing and be talking on the phone.  One of those things at a time was more than enough for me. 

As an adult I tried having roommates several times but I hated it and my desperate need to be alone and get some quiet always drove a wedge between my mostly extroverted (or maybe just normal) roommates and myself.  People don't take it kindly when they see your light on as they're coming up the driveway and then instantly see it shutoff when they slam their car door.  They took it personally, but they shouldn't have.  It wasn't about them; it was about my need for silence.  I finally gave up on having a roommate and lived alone for a number of years.  

You might be tempted to think that living alone would create an imbalance and I would need to fill some of that silence, but instead it only grew.  No music in the car, entire days spent without television or phone calls.  I was learning to be alone with my thoughts.  I was learning to process everything so that I wouldn't rely on something to distract me as a form of self medication.  It's not good for people to be alone too long; we're social creatures after all, but neither is it good for us to be constantly busy and distracted by interaction and noise.

Eventually I had a family and I quite enjoyed all the noise that came from busy, playing children. Both my children were very verbal at an early age.  My oldest daughter was speaking in full sentences by her first birthday and never tired of talking about anything and everything.  I found her to be fantastic company and I never once asked her to stop.  I even enjoyed the noise from squalling fighting children, which happened occasionally, but was rare.  And yet, the television, music, and phone still didn't feature much in our lives.  That is a different kind of noise.

As I mentioned, it is best to stay between the extremes of isolation and socialization and constantly having something in front of your eyes or in your ears entertaining you.  It prevents you from dealing with your faults, processing the hurts, learning what went wrong so you can avoid those mistakes in the future and basically just keeps you in a state of homeostasis—no growth, no change, no life.

Life is so very short.  I don't want to waste a single second of mine, not my very brief years with my children, not my years of being strong and healthy, not my twilight years.  I hope when I'm older you'll still find me out here, walking in the woods, enjoying the silence, or curled up in a rocking chair reading a story to a roly-poly grandchild.  With only the crickets, and our own laughter filling the air.

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