It’s ironic. I recently changed the informal title for this monthly section of my visit with you from What I’m Doing to What I’m Thinking. And in the last month, my focus has been heavily skewed toward the former instead of the latter. It caused me to pause for a moment and reflect, attempting to redirect my attention to that cerebral domain. For more than five years, I have consistently shared some unique thought or action that I engaged in over the previous month. But as this month’s visit quickly approached, I found myself anxious about what I’d share.
I laid in bed, staring at the ceiling around 4am, while the waterfall sounds from the app on my phone tried its best to coax me back to sleep. The sound of silence was too distracting for me. I needed some sort of repetitive background noise to block out all the nuanced and abrupt disruptions found on the blank canvas of nighttime. And then it happened. Perhaps it was simply an app failure, or maybe it was an ironic form of kismet. Silence returned. The app closed, and I found myself staring at the same ceiling, now sans background noise distraction.
The settling of my house’s foundation. The distant hum of a single-engine airplane. The air conditioning unit cycling on while blowing the hanging mobile below the vent in my bedroom into motion. The moments of silence in between, deafening. It’s something we’ve all heard before, the way silence can speak louder than any words, if we’re open to listening. And I guess that’s the whole point of this meandering conversation. We can’t fully appreciate the power or importance of silence until we immerse ourselves inside it. I may have been forced into doing so in this case, but the effects were equally impactful.
Once I removed all the external noise (both literal and metaphorical) from my thought process, I found myself able to think again. There’s an ebb and flow to our thoughts and actions. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by one or the other at different times. It’s in the balance of one with the other that our thoughts fuel our actions, while our actions simultaneously propel our thoughts forward.
Sometimes we need to swing from one extreme to the other in order to appreciate that perfect equilibrium. The sound of silence helped me do just that. Embrace the noise and the quiet, the chaos and the stillness, both have something important to share.
Would you like to connect with Dave and learn more about his daily thoughts and life as an author? Join his community, receive a free copy of his Pigeon Grove prequel novella, Fly Away Home, and be the first to share a sip of caffeine for the soul each month!
Comments