A meditation on (and in) silence

Because of the work I do, which requires close concentration so I can
spot misplaced commas and see when the period is missing after Ibid., I
like to work in a quiet room. No daytime TV, which rots your brain. How
do I know this? My grandfather, who had worked in the accounting department
of one of the big St. Louis department stores, retired and started watching
daytime TV…and with five years he was hospitalized with Alzheimer’s. (It’s
a blessing that he died within a couple weeks of his hospitalization. My
family didn’t have to witness the awful decline that comes with the disease.)
Nor do I listen to daytime radio, which is mostly talkradio, i.e., nasty,
misogynistic, or “hip” men babbling on and on and on.




I don’t even, alas, listen to my vast collection of CDs anymore. They’re
mostly old musicals, Broadway and studio cast albums originally released
on 33 rpm long play records. I used to have a huge collection of these
records, but after I found the CDs, I gradually gave the records away.
If I played CDs now, I’d be singing along and not even see those superfluous
semicolons or funny spelling mistakes like “taking my dissertation to be
printed and bounded within the next few days.” (This came from a Ph.D.
candidate.) Or I’d be singing along with
Pete ’n’ Arlo or
Noel Coward  or
Tom Lehrer and be missing things like “‘Wholly shit what the hell
is happening,’ he yells” or “From the removal of her coverall, she revealed
the skimpy black string bikini that barely covered the aerials of her breast
and the small patch of black cloth that laid over her crouch.” If I were
singing along with the
Bobs I’d miss just plain awful writing like “Toni’s eye breathed fire
as she mentally locked horns with this woman” and “‘Get off my car,’ I
said through gritted, perfectly straight teeth.” Folks, I am not making
these things up. A decade and a half of editing has given me some wondrous
gifts that, as they say, keep on giving.

I learned the value of silence when I was in graduate school. You don’t
want to be reading
The Faerie Queene or
Paradise Lost or anything by Shakespeare or Dryden or Donne with
folk songs or operettas saturating the air around you. The professor who
taught the classes I took on Spenser and Milton and a whole lot of Shakespeare
gave pop quizzes on the footnotes! I also needed copious peace and quiet
while I was writing my dissertation, which is 255 pages of literary criticism
plus thirteen pages of bibliography plus three appendixes. All that writing
required a lot of time alone in a quiet room. (No, it wasn’t a padded room.)

So how does the quiet meditation work? It’s not anything fancy. You can
do it anytime, day or night. You just sit with your eyes closed and your
hands folded or in a meditative position. And then you listen. Take note
of what you hear. (Yes, you guessed it—this is a mindfulness meditation.)
Ahhh, I’m hearing the crows across the street having a very loud conversation.
At least two squirrels are engaging in what I call the “squirrely love
call.” It’s flirtation (to put it politely). Now it’s quiet again. All
I can hear is the hum of the refrigerator. Good. That means the electrical
grid is working and sending power to my apartment. Now my neighbors are
talking…something about bus routes. Our front doors are within a couple
feet of each other, and on warm days we just have our screen doors between
us. I can also hear when she’s cooking or washing dishes and when one of
them takes ice cubes out of their freezer and slams the tray on the counter.




Now it’s quiet again. Just the hum of the fridge…oh, here comes a cat
to help me listen. Cats love meditative vibes. They purr along. Now I hear
a helicopter. It’s probably near the beach and could be from the Long Beach
Police Department, the Coast Guard station at the ports, or one of the
Los Angeles TV stations. There are always helicopters buzzing around the
L.A. Basin. When it’s really quiet, I can also hear the cars and trucks
on the 710 freeway. I live only a couple blocks from Fire Station #2, and
the fire engines frequently travel up my street. When I hear the sirens,
I always murmur, “Blessings to you and where you’re going.” You can do
that, too.




Remove your earbuds, turn off your devices, and try this meditation. Don’t
make a big deal of it. If you’re feeling a bit frazzled, just sit in silence
and listen. Let the sounds come to you. Identify them, comment on them
if you want to, and then let them be. Keep listening. Wait for the next
thing you hear. Whether it’s soft or loud, identify it and let it be. Unless
it’s an emergency alarm, don’t let it disturb you. If it is an emergency,
or course, get up and take action, but otherwise, just let the sounds be
what they are.




It’s good to sit in silence. You get to listen to what I think is the
electricity in your brain, to hear your synapses popping, maybe observe
your brain chemistry in action. Well, there’s some sort of sound in there.
I can hear it. The key is not to go to sleep, although if that’s what your
body needs, that’s what will happen, so don’t fight it. I fall asleep sometimes,
even when the neighbors and their TV and the helicopters and the people
walking up and down the street are making all the noise they can make.
What often happens when I’m sitting in silence, though, is that ideas for
blogs wander into my mind. Sometimes whole paragraphs march in. Like this
blog just did.