Listening to Silence
It's okay to pause your adventure sometimes to simply notice you're alive.
During an online mindfulness practice session, a new participant said it reminded her of an experience during a family vacation years ago.
The exercise we’d just done involved hearing ambient sounds and feeling body sensations.
She told us about driving from Las Vegas to Death Valley one summer. Her husband was in the passenger seat and her kids were in the back. The temperature was over a hundred degrees.
At one point, she noticed there were no other cars in sight.
She turned off the radio, rolled down her window, and asked her family, “Do you hear that?”
Everyone was confused as she slowed to a stop, turned off the engine, and said, “Listen.”
Her kids rolled down their windows, but her husband asked her what she was doing. “What if the car won’t start back up?”
She decided not to argue.
They just sat there in the middle of the desert together, surrounded by quiet.
The experiment didn’t last long, but all these years later, she’s still glad she paused their adventure to hear the silence when they’d had the chance.
This is one of my favorite reactions to an attention exercise — the recognition of how ordinary and accessible mindful awareness really is.
Spontaneous mindful awareness happens all the time, but we’re usually so busy making sense of things we forget to consciously notice what it sounds and feels like to be alive.
Is there any silence where you are right now? If so, take a few seconds to hear it.
If not, take a minute to check if there’s any hiding under your chair, in another part of the room, or just outside a window.
Silence is easy to miss. So are most sounds.
Habitual mindfulness practice increases the odds you’ll remember to savor the richness of ordinary moments more often — whether you’re on vacation or not.
Listening Feels Like This
PS My three favorite documentaries about listening to silence are In Pursuit of Silence, Into Great Silence, and Touch the Sound. It’s not a documentary, but Sound of Metal is another film that will change the way you hear.