stepping stone sunday: make room for silence
There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub. –Elizabeth Kübler-Ross
It occurred to me on the way home from New Jersey this week–many airports and airplanes and meetings and workshops later–that we spend very little time in silence. True silence. Silence not punctuated by Spongebob Squarepants in the background in the next room. Silence not filled up with announcements and newscasters and commercials and the ding of text messages arriving.
Sometimes silence is absence. Things fall away, people leave, pets die, and all leave silence where there was noise, a silence that reminds us of what was, a hole.
And sometimes silence is full, full up, full of meaning and quiet and not reminiscent of loss. Sometimes it can buoy us and calm and reassure us.
This week, my stepping stone from day to day will be just ten minutes of silence, of doing nothing, of not noticing the dust on the piano or answering the phone or opening the door for a pet to go in or out or making a grocery list, but of sitting, quietly, with my eyes closed. Breathing. As Lynn Johnston has said, "The most profound statements are often said in silence."
I will learn to meditate this week, ten minutes at a time. Just ten. If I find myself saying, I don't have time, I will remind myself how utterly ridiculous and egocentric and unbalanced and awful it is to say I don't have ten minutes to spare.
"Not a square to spare," Elaine said memorably in a favorite Seinfeld episode where she is asked by the woman in the next bathroom stall for some toilet paper. "Not ten minutes to spare" has the same feeling. No? Then I will prioritize differently, create space and time, even if it means I have to go sit in the bathroom alone to get my ten minutes.
Yes.
Ten minutes a day.
I admit that I will begin with something of an immersion process: For months I have told my friend Sid Jordan that I want him to teach me how to meditate. He has offered since the beginning of the year each month when we meet for our Bridging Differences book group. Each month I have deferred–when I finish this travel, when the book is done, when the kids are back in school–and each month he has nodded, knowingly. So imagine my delight at his kind offer to teach meditation for an hour each morning during the Life is a Verb retreat starting this Thursday. (He will also offer an hour of yoga instruction to us each day–what a gift!) Sid probably recognized that I would be a captive audience during those three days, and he was right.
Yes.
Can you spare ten minutes a day to hear nothing but the sound of your own breathing? Say yes.
Make room for silence.
