Tag: silence

I went into rehab recently…

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I went into rehab recently. It wasn’t to treat substance abuse, though both drugs and alcohol are banned at the facility I checked myself into. Rather, I went to free myself from the noise that is disrupting our mental health in the 21st century.I shut off my phone and laptop and locked them away for three days. But this was more than a digital detox: I joined 50 other people in taking a vow of silence. Instead of scrolling or chatting, we spent hours in guided meditation and the rest of the time alone with our thoughts. As silent retreats go, this one was brief. But I had never kept quiet for so long in my life, and I hadn’t been without my electronics for that long since I got my first iPhone 18 years ago.

I craved the unplugging, but I was admittedly skeptical about elements of the experiment. I didn’t think I had the patience for meditation, and my few previous attempts at yoga typically ended with the administration of Advil. […]

But underneath all that woo, I also found something true. The silent unplugging made me appreciate, in ways I hadn’t fully understood, how much my phone has hijacked my attention. In the notification-free quiet, I wondered: Have I forgotten how to just be?

 Of course, the world’s religions have been practicing forms of monastic silence for thousands of years. The difference is those ancient orders, and even those who went on silent retreats in pre-smartphone decades, didn’t have Instagram accounts. Now, when we go into silence and turn off our devices, we are entirely isolated. In our always-on, hyperconnected world, this is disorienting.⁠⁠

⁠⁠I expected I would go through some digital withdrawal, and that happened. Dozens of times, I felt an involuntary urge to reach for my phone: to check the time, to take a picture, to see if the snow had canceled my flight, to look up “upma” before ladling some onto my plate, to order Valentine’s Day flowers, to find out what I was missing and who was trying to reach me. It felt unnatural not to be scrolling while waiting for a session to begin.

But something else happened during those three days that I didn’t expect — and it was frightening…

— Dana Milbank, read more here: “I went into phone-free silence. Something disturbing happened.” (Washingon Post, February 13, 2026

Miracle, all of it.

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Next morning, as the fog lifts, I have the sense I often have here, of seeing the world at the moment it comes to life. I recall looking down at the twenty-five pods gathered around the bell tower and the refectory, tiny against the hillside and the huge expanse of sea beyond; they looked so frail I wished to say a prayer for them, as for a newborn in the not always easy world. So orderly, too, in their hopeful human arrangement. Like the redwoods in the valley beside them: each with roots five feet deep, but intertwined, so the health of one depends on the health of every other.

— Pico Iyer, Aflame: Learning from Silence (Riverhead Books, January 14, 2025). Written from his cell at New Camaldoli Hermitage in the Santa Lucia Mountains of Big Sur, California.

Notes:

  • Other highlights from early in the book:
    • ““When I go out into the world,” volunteers one of the brothers, “I feel like a sea anemone…A little creature of the sea. You know how sensitive and tender they are. If they trust where they’ve been placed, they open up. Put them in a harsh environment and they close very quickly.”
    • Where are such people in my daily life? I wonder, back in my trailer. Everywhere, comes the answer, but I can’t see or stop to hear them. I’m too caught up in my own schedule, my seeming busyness. Like someone who plays the radio all the time and claims never to hear the sea.
    • Luxury indeed to follow whim; my conscious mind can argue me out of any belief and into it again. Pure joy to inhabit a world whose dictionary has no place for “worry” or for “strife.” I recall the day I flew across the ocean after hearing that my father was in the ICU; as I stepped into the small hospital room, I realized that my bank account, my resume, my business card would none of them be of very much help at all. The only thing that could sustain him—or me—would be whatever I’d gathered in stillness.
  • Review of Pico Iyer’s new book here: Pico Iyer Made His Name Traveling. Now He Explores Inner Landscapes. (NY Times, Jan 3 2025)
  • Photo: Vladimir Miranda, Cabo Mexico.
  • Post Title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.”

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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Camus’s wisdom arose from never forgetting the power of sunlight. He grew up in poverty, he often writes, in the industrial coastal town of Oran, in Algeria, but in another sense he was always rich; he and everyone around him had light and water and sunshine at their doorsteps. He was born with blessings that his friends in the gray classrooms of the Sorbonne envied. “Even my revolts,” he confesses, recalling his boyhood, “were brilliant with sunshine.” His upbringing likewise instructed him in honoring the invisible. “I lived on almost nothing,” he writes at one point, “but also in a kind of rapture.” He clings “like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.”

I look around me—the wonky room, the squeaky terrace, the wide blue grandeur in the distance—and think: No house to maintain, no phones to answer. No noise to block out, no traffic to navigate. I can bring every part of myself to every moment.

— Pico Iyer, Aflame: Learning from Silence (Riverhead Books, January 14, 2025). Written from his cell at New Camaldoli Hermitage in the Santa Lucia Mountains of Big Sur, California.

Notes:

  • Other highlights from early in the book:
    • “Success might be another word for peace and peace, at heart, for freedom from ceaseless striving.”
      “And contemplation, I come to see, does not in any case mean closing your eyes so much as opening them, to the glory of everything around you. Coming to your senses, by getting out of your head.“
    • “I’ve never wanted to be part of any group of believers. The globe is too wide, too various, to assume one knows it all.”
    • So why am I exultant to find myself in the silence of this Catholic monastery? Maybe because there’s no “I” to get in the way of the exultancy. Only the brightness of the blue above and below. That red-tailed hawk circling, the bees busy in the lavender. It’s as if a lens cap has come off and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy…Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the center of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the center of me.
  • Review of Pico Iyer’s new book here: Pico Iyer Made His Name Traveling. Now He Explores Inner Landscapes. (NY Times, Jan 3 2025)
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Sunday Morning

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It starts slowly as I walk from the meditation hall to lunch. When I sit down to eat, the food appears as a mixture of everything that was required to bring it to the table. I imagine all the land, dirt, sun, and water needed to grow a leaf or a single grain of rice. I imagine all the cells inside a potato that have been cared for as they’ve grown and were pulled from the soil. I see dirt in the wrinkles of hands that dig and plant and harvest. I see the death and decay of the plants that came before them, relinquishing one existence for another before being plucked up as something new. People drive machines and fix water systems. They crate, bag, and box the food and place it on trucks and ships and planes, which are created by other people with big, brilliant brains. I see minerals dredged from the earth to make steel and aluminum and iron and watch people melt it down and pour it into forms that make the machines that move it all across the world. I marvel that the chair I sit in is made of materials that required thousands of minds to perfect before becoming an instrument of my comfort. The rivets on the table, fastening the legs to the plank. The material of the tiles and the hands that laid them on the floor. The trees that become the skeleton of the building. The corrugated roof that keeps the rain and sun off the tables. The bowl that holds the food and the spoon and the water in the glass.

Eventually it all leads back to a parade of every picture I’ve ever made flashing behind my eyes as everything I can see becomes worthy of gratitude. It’s a feeling I’ve forgotten. And as nuts as it sounds, I can see one big, infinite cycle coming together as a single bite of food. For the second time in my life, the word complete is incomplete.

As it begins to overwhelm me I feel a bit batshit-crazy. But what’s crazy isn’t the recognition that so much is worthy of gratitude. What’s crazy is that I haven’t noticed it before as I replay my life in fast-forward, thinking of everything that moved me, fed me, and shaped me and I see how fortunate I have been. Being here at all is a display of my good fortune. I’ve been lucky not only to see the world but to continue to expand myself by changing my lens. A guy goes into a short, spiritual exile halfway around the world and wakes up: It’s a humorous trope and I’m not blind to it. But it’s not just the privilege of who I am and what I’ve been able to do. Likewise, the revelation is accessible to anyone at any time, and how they come to it isn’t really the point. It’s the privilege of living at all, and this is a privilege we all share despite how hard life can be at times. The duality of our sorrows and joys is the buy-in. That I have a body that lives and breathes and moves is a gift. I have a body and mind that gets to be depressed, that gets to navigate ceaseless thought.

— Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within (Random House, July 9, 2024)

Notes:

Sunday Morning

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I also painted a study of a seascape, nothing but a bit of sand, sea, sky, grey and lonely—sometimes I feel a need for that silence—where there’s nothing but the grey sea—with an occasional seabird. But otherwise, no other voice than the murmur of the waves.

— Vincent van Gogh, from a letter to his brother Theo, 17 September 1882 (via Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters)

Notes: DK Photo, 5:21 am. Saturday July 6, 2024. Quote via More Than Ideas.