Silence

"The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind."
- Albert Einstein

"We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship."
- C.S. Lewis

You would think that a person living alone, such as I, would find more solitude in life. That may be true sometimes. I mean, I guess it’s easier to find a quiet place with no kids running around & stuff like that. However, I find myself most of the time creating noise for myself – I have my Dell Jukebox rocking out, or the TV is on, the air conditioner is loud, my dog wants to play, etc., etc. I went camping this past weekend & was looking forward to being alone in my tent with a book…but I don’t know what I was thinking because I was at a motorcycle rally & there wasn’t a moment’s time when someone wasn’t showing their ass, revving up bikes, and making as much noise as possible.

I have always thought that living in a monastery for a while would be beneficial to my mental health. I don’t think they’d take me though – for one thing, I’m not even Catholic. But, the idea of living somewhere quiet with no TV, cell phone, internet, and things like that sounds really good to me. I don’t think I could endure it for a long period of time, but I’d like to do it for at least a month or two.

A friend of mine recently wrote about silence, and I thought it was interesting because solitude has been on my mind a lot lately. Have you ever noticed how much work it is to be somewhere quiet? Last night I was reading The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis and there was a paragraph or 2 about Noise. If you’ve never read the book, it’s letters from a demon to his nephew who is trying to entice a human to the dark side. Anyway, one of the methods he wanted him to use was using noise as a distraction. It’s harder to pray when there’s noise around you, including noise in your mind.

As Einstein said, I think that solitude can stimulate the creative mind. When I need some creative juices, nothing is better than turning off the TV and the music, and just read or write or meditate. It seems to help my brain adjust itself. I guess all the noise can cause a brain overflow. It seems like I can think better if I just turn everything off ….so I think I have a new invention: there’s talk therapy, drug therapy, and my new invention – silence therapy. I am planning on finding some time to put this invention to use….I think I may try to come up with a set amount of time that I’m going to try to do this every week and see what happens.