We live in a noisy world. People talking too loudly. Open offices. Traffic. Music. Sirens. Television. Social media. So much noise. We spend our time trying to block it out so we can focus. But then when we do have a quiet moment we can’t think. It’s feels too empty.
Maybe we need the noise in order to focus? Or maybe we’ve become so accustomed to doing the double duty of blocking out noise effectively and trying to focus that we’ve forgotten how to tap into our creative energy. Maybe we’ve gotten uncomfortable with silence.
I sat here for two minutes trying to think about what to write before I relented and read a book. I spent twenty minutes before that scrolling through Twitter. I’ll probably spend another twenty on Instagram. Instead of sitting in silence and allowing myself time to think and clear my head.
It’s easy to complain about the noise. The distraction. It’s obvious. It’s harder to do the work of being truly silent and allowing your mind to tap into its own thoughts again. Its harder to have to deal with the emptiness and fill it with something meaningful. It’s harder.
But this is where the real work and the real change happens. The hard work of being silent leads to clarity and clarity leads to vision and vision leads to action. There are so few minutes in the day that are still and calm and quiet. And they’re scary because of how full of possibility they are. What can we do? What can we say? Who can we reach?
Now that the noise has stopped what are you gonna do?
