The gift of Quiet
Craving Quiet, and Claiming it
I’ve spent a lot of time in the car over the past month. I love car trips. Long drives are soothing to me.
This month I’ve been travelling a route I know well. I drive it often. The destination is three hours away. Typically, I drive three hours to the destination, do six hours of highly focused work, and drive three hours back home. These are long days. I usually listen to music or news shows. I have some very peaceful music that I rotate through. I appreciate the opportunity to listen to long-format news shows in their entirety.
As I drove this week, the quiet music felt loud and intrusive. The news shows poured content - interesting content, but still content - into my already full and overflowing thoughts, leaving me feeling overwhelmed. How could I possible process and use all of this information? I can’t.
I am craving quiet. I turned the radio off. I sank into the stillness, followed the road, and let myself just be.
We will embrace quiet this holiday. We will observe a few little traditions that are meaningful to us.
We’ve chosen to skip all of the seasonal noise this year - the visual noise, the verbal noise, the lyrical noise. We are not attending any events. We are not putting up a tree. We are giving ourselves the gift of quiet. The gift of stillness. The gift of less. The gift of time.
There are thoughts to think. There are tasks to complete. There are sleeps to sleep. There are stacks to purge. There are family games to play. There are laughs to laugh. The recent years have been a steady stream of high impact action and decisions and deadlines. When the page turns and 2022 begins, we will embark on the tenth consecutive year of significant demands.
Ten years.
The events, joys, sorrows, successes, and lessons contained within these years are not known to others. We have experienced them privately, as is our preference.
Perhaps that is your preference, too. Perhaps you are entering the eleventh year of hard work. Perhaps you are in a lifetime of hard work.
There are some seasons of life that are like this. Times when after the most careful, judicious pruning of the task list, the most wise and liberal use of the word “no,” the remaining set of “must-be-done” is long, critical, urgent, complicated.
These seasons are not without joy. We have had wonderful journeys to new places, celebrated wonderful milestones, and watched wonderful sunrises and sunsets.
But we must take care of ourselves in order to sustain this pace.
As the world around us spins and dances and sings and shops through the holiday season, we will retreat. We will rest. We will let peace fall upon us.
And in the quietness, we will hear the angels that we need to hear. We will follow them as they lead us forward. We will enter the tenth year with nourished souls, with ready hearts and hands. Spiritually elevated and refreshed.