Listening to Silence

A simple way to notice what you've been hearing all along.

A few years ago, during an online mindfulness practice session, someone shared a story I still think about.

We’d just done an exercise involving listening to ambient sounds and feeling bodily sensations, and a woman who was new to the group said it reminded her of an experience from a family vacation when her kids were little.

She described 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 well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

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 together in the middle of the desert, surrounded by quiet.

The experiment didn’t last long, but all these years later, she was still grateful that she paused their adventure to hear the silence when they’d had the chance.

This is one of my favorite kinds of reactions to an attention exercise — the recognition of how ordinary and accessible mindfulness really is.

Spontaneous mindful awareness happens all the time, but we're usually so busy making sense of things that we forget to notice what it actually sounds and feels like to be alive.

Is there any silence where you are right now? Take a few seconds to see if you can hear it.

If not, look for it somewhere else—under your chair, in another room, just outside a window, or even in the brief spaces between sounds.

Silence is easy to miss. So are most sounds.

The more often you remember to look — or in this case, listen— the more ordinary moments have to offer.

I’d love to hear about it.

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Here are my three favorite documentaries about listening to silence:

• In Pursuit of Silence

• Into Great Silence

• Touch the Sound

All three had an impact on the quality of my listening for hours afterward and have lingered in my imagination for years — the auditory equivalent of muscle memory.

While it’s not a documentary, Sound of Metal is another film that will change the way you hear.

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