MIND MOVES:A RAPID SEQUENCE of loud knocks woke me from a deep sleep. It was still dark. I was alone in a log cabin in a remote forest. Human beings never come this way. I was alarmed – no, terrified. Adrenaline jolted through my system.
Everything was still. I could feel the cold in the air and see in my mind’s eye the grass outside covered in a white frost. Since the knocking stopped, all I could hear was deathly silence.
Then it started up again. Closer this time. Steady and insistent. Something was wrong. Something was not the way it was meant to be.
I braced myself, got out of bed, and looked out into the dawn mist. All I could see was a small bird circling a tree right outside the window. As my primitive brain calmed down, my rational mind kicked in. I recognised the unique shape of that little bird’s head. It was a woodpecker. And these guys always travel in pairs.
The knocking started again, right over my head. But it didn’t startle me this time. There was nothing to fear. Just a small bird pecking furiously on the ceiling over my bed. Simply doing what nature had designed him (or her) to do.
When they flew away, silence returned. It’s hard to convey silence. In spring or summer, this forest would have been filled with the sounds of a dawn chorus and the movement of unseen animals. Now there was utter stillness, a kind of emptiness. Life unplugged.
Later, when the sun came up, I wrapped myself in a blanket and took my coffee out onto the veranda. The light was dazzling and intense. It bounced off the white birch trees and lit their reflection in the still waters of the pond beneath.
A weekend rainfall had brought down the last of the leaves. The tapestry of autumn had been a beautiful sight, a patchwork of orange, rust, yellow and golden leaves. There was still some gold that had managed to hang on. I thought of a line from a 1960s song: “Silence is golden, but my eyes can see”. The Tremeloes. A band I had seen walk through the lobby of the Europa Hotel, in Killarney, in 1971; four tall guys who looked to me then like Greek Gods.
As I sat there letting the silence of nature seep into my soul, those lyrics finally made some sense.
Silence sharpens perception. It can allow us to see and hear things more clearly. The scratching sounds that a squirrel makes scampering up the bark of a tree; the distant cawing of a raven; the rustle of bare branches when the wind picks up; the mind knitting together memories from the past with perceptions of the present and hopes for the future.
At the close of the film A Single Man,Colin Firth talks about those moments in our lives when everything seems to be exactly the way it is meant to be. In these moments, our lives make sense and we feel immense gratitude.
We want to hang on to these moments but we know they pass – happiness is a highly unstable state. But in those moments we remember what’s really important to us. Somehow that makes even the most daunting challenges seem possible.
Living in a culture that seems dedicated to keeping all of us overstimulated and constantly distracted, moments of silence can be hard to come by. And when we do encounter them, they may feel uncomfortable at first.
While distractions insulate us from edges in our lives, silence takes us to those edges and makes us more aware of conundrums and contradictions that are part of our lives. Sometimes silence is more than we can take. When it is too much, we may choose to give ourselves a break and reach for the remote.
But when we can give it a chance, silence can allow us to reconcile the contradictions within us so that even though they remain within us, they cease to be a problem. We are not meant to resolve all our contradictions, but to live with them and to see them in the light of some larger vision that make them trivial by comparison.
Silence can be a resting place, where new perspectives are achieved, and where forgotten truths can be remembered.
Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong – the National Centre for Youth Mental Health (headstrong.ie)