Frenzy, and Silence
Mostly just wanted to tell y’all I’m still alive. Five more days until I turn in my third-year review packet, which is the thing junior academics do halfway to tenure to try and convince their department they’re worth the investment. It involves reviewing everything you’ve done, hoped to do, or failed to do over the last few years, writing up statements about it, stacking everything you’ve managed to produce in (hopefully) a big pile, and giving it to your senior colleagues, who then pass it up to a divisional committee that reviews it, even though next to none of them are from your discipline. With that hanging over my head it’s been hard to justify writing a couple more reams on the blog, but that’ll be over soon and I should be back in the game here.
I’m sitting this morning with my half-grapefruit, my yogurt, my sweatshirt-bundled, puffy-eyed, bedhead self, thinking about how hard almost everyone I know is working, how fast everything goes, and how kind of shitty it is that we all have so little time right now. All the academics, the lawyers, the organizers I know–no one can possibly get their jobs done in 40 hours a week, much less stay on top of all the rest of it, whether it be family or retaining some semblance of friendships or whatever, without feeling exhausted. I’ve been noticing that at the end of the day, if I can finally manage to turn everything off and stay off the phone, my ears ring. I don’t know if it’s full-blown tinnitis or just an effect of the constant noise. Thinking about this last night led me to fantasies of a really quiet job–a job with no students knocking on the door, no blings and buzzers going off, no one talking, no having to talk for the better part of four hours in classrooms. What would be a really quiet job, maybe knitting in Iceland?
I miss and I crave silence. I’ve started setting stronger boundaries on weekday evening activities in order to recoup some of that silence. But for a word person (and for a triple air sign, god help me), it’s easy to unconsciously slip into filling the “silence” with subtler kinds of noise: reading, thinking. I love slipping into a hot bath with a New Yorker or Oprah magazine; I think of that as relaxing. But it’s not silence; it’s more words and images and stuff. I love lounging on the couch with a soft blanket and a purring cat–but if I let my brain fill up with monkey thoughts, that’s not silence either. I mean, I understand there’s a time for musing and for flipping through magazines. But what I need is quiet. And it surprises me how hard that can be to achieve. Even in meditation practice. Painting or drawing is often a better route; I should do it more.
I wonder what a silent retreat would be like. Someone I used to know who just caught up with me on Facebook (a phenomenon I definitely want to post about) said she just returned from a 10-day (!) silent retreat. She described it as “a gift.” I bet it’s also harrowing. Not maybe so much the need to talk, but the potential anxiety of knowing you can’t. I’d like to try it, maybe a 3-day for starters. I bet once you get over whatever freakiness comes up, it must be a huge relief, like an ocean. Maybe you hear things you didn’t even know were there, inside or outside. Maybe you hear your soul. Or maybe you just shut your mouth and give your ears a break.
Ok, I’m going to shoot for 15 minutes of real silence, and see if I can bring a little of it with me today.
