THE POWER OF SILENCE
Overwhelmed by life’s constant juggle, former GH editor Louise Chunn found herself wishing she could walk into the middle of a wood just to find some peace and quiet. As the busiest time of the year approaches, she investigates how we can all find ways of
Finding peace and quiet
Afew months ago I spent five days in Aspen, Colorado. It’s a ski resort in the Rocky Mountains, home to celebrities and billionaire hedge fund investors. But what really stands out are not the people or their luxury playground, but the peaks and valleys all around you. Step out on to a hiking trail and all you hear is the crunch of your feet on the earth, musical birdsong, and a gentle wind in the fir trees. The magnificence of silence and virtually untouched nature combines to take your breath away.
Erling Kagge knows what I mean, and then some. The 54-year-old Norwegian completed solo expeditions to the North and South Poles, plus the successful ascent of Mount Everest. He was alone. He didn’t say a word the whole time. You could say Kagge took my mini-break communing with The Great Outdoors to another level. The feelings those achievements inspired led him to write a book on silence: what is it? Where is it? Why is it more important than ever? Now Silence In The Age Of Noise has been translated into 35 languages and is about to be published in the UK.
It certainly feels like a subject whose time has come. It’s not that modern society is becoming noisier, but we are becoming more distracted, and distractable, by what’s around us. Could the antidote be silence?
OUR GRANDMOTHERS WOULD THINK WE WERE INSANE
The book was an attempt to convince Kagge’s teenage daughters (and the world) that silence is not a space to be filled, but a positive in itself. ‘I believe our primary responsibility to the earth is to understand ourselves. Listen to yourself, become a better human being. If my grandmother who died 18 years ago saw us, she’d think we were all insane. Living our lives through other people and our phones. It’s crazy,’ he says.
But it isn’t easy to drop everything and dedicate yourself to silence. Thoughts and deeds tug at your attention. What if you get an email? What’s happening on Instagram? Has Trump tweeted again? Kagge is keen to explain what our brains are up to: ‘The more we are inundated [with information from our devices], the more we wish to be distracted. We don’t know if we’ve received an email or message so we check and recheck our phones like a one-armed bandit in the attempt to achieve satisfaction. So you are never satisfied.
‘Some users get a good response when they post something on social media, while most sit waiting for anyone to care. The more unpredictable this interaction is, the more the user is addicted,’ he says. We can all recognise this model, especially among young people, some of whom apparently cannot put their phones down, even to eat.
As the mother of a 17-year-old girl, I know that living with teenagers makes silence more difficult to find. But is it their talk or arguments or music or hairdryers? ‘All of this!’ says Kagge. ‘Girls of around 15 years old are probably the unhappiest people in the world. There is so much frustration in their minds and bodies. They have so many changes, insecurities, challenges, disappointments. And it’s not just in my house. I’ve travelled a lot, and although the life of a teenage girl in Southern Sudan may be different to a girl in Oslo, it’s similar, too.’
It was only when he became a father, Kagge says, that he understood the importance of silence. ‘It enables us to understand ourselves,’ he explains. ‘It allows you to get inside of what you are doing.’
PUTTING SILENCE TO THE TEST
Lately, I’ve popped in earplugs and listened to podcasts on my phone for my twice-daily dog walks, telling myself that I’m keeping up to date with news and current affairs. But for four days I went ‘naked’ to the local park and beyond. I sat for five minutes each time, breathing, thinking, observing what was going on, but trying not to worry about what my Whatsapp groups would be sharing right now. I struggled at first, but the prospect of being alone and unavailable became more and more appealing.
Some of what Kagge writes about is directly related to mindfulness meditation principles, but many might find silence a far simpler achievement. It’s not all about the breath; it’s about appreciating the luxury of silence and giving yourself up to it. When I groaned to my teenage daughter that ‘Sometimes I want to go into the middle of a wood where no one else can reach me,’ she was so amused she put it out on social media under #weirdthingsmumssay. But I think the household could see what I was getting at.
We women often fill our days with things that are inessential. Does it really matter that every tap in the house shines bright? That every email is answered? So often the social facilitators, women often won’t give themselves the opportunity to step back and observe rather than drive themselves (and their families) forward.
I’m the founder of welldoing.org, which matches people with the therapists most suited to them. More women than men seek help through counselling, and often in middle-age. Therapy sessions may contain silences which can be unsettling if you’ve not experienced them before. As one therapist said, ‘It is in that space that the client will take themselves one step closer to their truth. I’ve sometimes filled the silence and known that it was a mistake – that in doing so, we lost something.’ So being silent is powerful, and useful.
Taken together – Kagge’s book and a creeping sense that social media was eating into my own life — I feel that I’ve been prompted into taking steps along a quieter path, away from the fear of missing out, towards the mountaintops where I can really discover what I think about the world. Care to join me? — I promise I won’t talk.