THE JOY OF SILENCE
When my husband can’t sleep, he reads. Anything, including The Wealth of Nations (in an attempt to bore himself to sleep – unfortunately he found it so interesting he was awake all night), Americans on Twitter who annoy him into further sleeplessness, and scientific research going on in weird corners of the world that he finds completely riveting. So not much sleep for him, but a whole lot of info going in.
The next morning, he has a LOT to say. My voice, on the other hand, takes a couple of hours to figure out where my face is.
This usually works quite well for us: I plough through a lot of coffee and look attentive while my husband gets what he found out the night before off his chest. But last weekend, for the first time, I experienced the utter joy of the silent breakfast, and I fear there may be no coming back from it.
I was at The Buddhist Retreat Centre in Ixopo, a wonderful, beautiful place that offers all kinds of retreats, accompanied by truly excellent food that you don’t have to even think about preparing yourself, which is a marvellous combination of things, in my view. You can spend a weekend at the BRC learning about local birds and trees, being part of a ceramic workshop with a worldrenowned potter, or doing a guided course in anything from writing a memoir to yoga, meditation and Buddhism itself, if that’s your interest.
I was there in the hope that I’d learn how to meditate, something I’ve always been too distracted to do but believe to be extremely worthwhile – and it was hugely helpful. But perhaps even more of a revelation was the fact that all talking is discouraged from after supper until quite a while after breakfast. So, while you eat your breakfast in the dining room with all the other retreatants, you eat entirely in silence: all you hear is the sound of cutlery on crockery, and birds and monkeys twittering and chattering in the background while the sun rises over the hills and – in my case – your voice slowly reconnects with your brain.
It’s surprisingly difficult to do, initially – you feel a bit rude for not enquiring how your neighbour slept the night before, or commenting on the weather, or offering the marmalade. But that wears off very quickly, I am happy to tell you, and you just settle down to… settling down.
It’s a very calming way to start the day, and I would strongly recommend giving it a bash. Now to convince the teens, let alone my husband!
Keep warm this July, and hold thumbs for rain.