You can tell it’s a holiday week because it’s so quiet! While the official day may not be here yet, the traffic tells me many people have already put work behind them. I love quiet days with empty streets. My favorite time to be downtown has always been when businesses and stores are closed. It just has a whole different feel.
Like most of our lives in the US, we fill the holidays with activity. Some of us plan elaborate meals with elegant place settings and seats assigned by calligraphied place cards. We clean for hours so we can fill the kitchen and dining room with dishes that will take more hours to clean. We work, work, work only to discover our guests must rush on to another dinner before the ice cream melts on the pie.
We watch parades and football and go back home without knowing what our cousins do for a living or where their kids go to school. It’s amazing how we can busy ourselves into a noisy frenzy that leaves no time for quiet, forget quiet reflection or thoughtful attunement.
How did we get so uncomfortable with stillness?
The barrage of two competing screens is barely enough to distract some in my home. What I keep coming back to is how on edge all that noise makes me feel. Is noise the cause of the anxiety that plagues them?
I guess what I’m wondering is why we create a frenzy and then suffer from the effects of it? Seems a lot like chasing our tails.
What would happen if we sat on the porch or in front of the fire this Thanksgiving and listened to each other instead of watching balloons float down 6th Avenue or channel surfing through games?
What if we just sat in the quiet? I know it probably sounds like I want to go back to the past. That’s not it.
What would happen if we stopped rushing, pushing, scrambling, hurrying…distracting, distracting, distracting? Especially, when we are actively creating part of our need for distraction.
What if Thanksgiving dinner were a normal supper plus a fancy dessert? Would we take more notice of the flavors and effort put into that one item? Would we take our time and savor it? Would we talk about it while envisioning the preparation? Would it remind us of stories of other desserts at other times – stories that would allow us to connect with the new in-law at the table?
You can say all you want about mindfulness, but quiet stillness as a default would allow us to relax into the present rather than applying laser focus to it.
Where has the ease of being part of the rhythm of the world gone? Perhaps it’s still on the ski slopes or under the curl of a wave. But we no longer feel it in a gallop beneath us on our way to get groceries or hear it in the crunch of a wheel on gravel.
At a recent party, someone asked my Serbian neighbor the biggest difference between living in the US and Serbia. His answer was how much less time we spend sitting and visiting – taking time during the day to enjoy each other and connect.
We have rampant anxiety, violence, addiction, and chronic illness all on the rise. I’m not 100% blaming those on a lack of quiet. But I think it’s worth studying those conditions in order to discover if there are ways in which they correlate with a lack of it.
And I’m certain it’s worth asking yourself why the next time you feel compelled to fill a piece of quiet with noisy, frenetic activity.
