Still-o-phobia: The Fear of Silences
What's it gonna take
to slow us down
to let the silence spin us around?
- Switchfoot, The Beautiful Letdown
In a few hours I'll be leaving urban Kansas City, my frenzied studies, our loft apartment, and this blog behind. My departure is not motivated by pent-up grief or self-reproach over my failure to place in the WORLDview Fiction Contest. (That's merely a good secondary reason.) Rather, I'm going on a retreat. I'm heading for the woods, a small cabin, and contemplative quiet.
However, as I anticipate the approaching get-away, occasionally glancing out the window, there's more on my mind than the thunderclouds forming overhead. For better or worse, synapses are firing; I'm thinking about connections, things related to the retreat, things that beg to be thought about, things like silence.
As a culture, why do we have such a big problem with silence? In Finding Focus in a Whirlwind, Jean Fleming observes,
We have become a people with an aversion to quiet and an uneasiness with being alone.
A cursory look at our lives seems enough to affirm the assertion. Our "media" players proliferate daily, as do our forms of media to play. With so many channels to choose from, a lot of our time is spent just sorting the options. Jump in the car, slump at the computer, pump a little iron - and the question of noise isn't "whether" but "which?" Which station? Which channel? Which genre? Which artist?
I wonder why we shun silence.
Surely our entertainment-driven culture is part of it. But beyond that, there must be an explanation for the way we seem to religiously avoid opportunities for quiet and reflection. What is it?
Most likely we're leery of what we might find. After all, in moments of quiet, what emerges? What comes to the surface? Arguably, it's often something brutally honest, something uncomfortable, something about us: revealed truth.
Truth tends to surface in silence. It's only the continuous hubbub and clatter of our lives that keep it at bay. I sometimes suspect we prefer it that way. In the words of C.H. Spurgeon:
Few men truly know themselves as they really are. Most people have seen themselves in a looking glass, but there is another looking glass, which gives true reflections, into which few men look.
A mirror named truth?
All of this goes to say that leaving on a retreat—pursuing soul-quiet, whether for a weekend or a moment—is a counter-cultural move these days. And one with much greater implications than a little R&R. Penetrating questions stalk us in the stillness.
To be or not to be? To believe or to reject? (Or, more pertinent for me, To write or not to write?)
Issues like these can only be addressed in moments of quiet. But I hear the radio crackling again. I guess the storm has blown over.
Which means now I can end this post and carry on with life's more pressing questions.
Like which station should I listen to?
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