I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.—Khalil Gibran
In silence we hear the whispers of wisdom
Among the list of people whom I can no longer find, and may well be deceased, is an associate professor of music by the name of Robert Woods. Dr. Woods was a rather unassuming individual from my student perspective, but in January of 1982, while teaching a course in electronic music, he taught us a very valuable lesson about the importance of silence. His assignment sounded simple enough: find a place with absolute silence, and see how long you can stand it. Being cocky college students, we laughed. It was J-term and the campus was more than half empty. Finding a quiet spot would be easy.
But Dr. Woods didn’t say find a quiet spot. His instructions were to find a place absolutely void of sound and when class convened the next day we shared our stories of just how difficult it had been to complete the assignment. So difficult, in fact, that I was the only one who had actually found a place of complete silence: the morgue.
I worked part time in a funeral home. After everyone else had left for the evening, I went into the empty embalming room, which was totally sealed, and shut the door. The experience might have been eery had I not been accustomed to being in the room. There was nothing in there that would make a sound without human intervention, or so I thought. As I settled in on a stool, I soon realized that the fluorescent bulbs were humming. One wouldn’t have noticed under normal conditions, but when all other distractions were removed, there it was: a low but distinct hum. There was only one thing to do: turn off the lights.
Yes, sitting along in a sealed embalming room in the dark is eery. Worse than the dark, though, was the complete silence. Not a sound. I not only could hear my own breathing, but my heart beat sounded louder the longer I sat there. I’d shift my weight on the stool and the shuffle of my slacks against the metal was loud. I cracked my knuckles and it sounded like fireworks. With its ceramic tile floor and walls, the acoustics of the room amplified any sound, but the only sound was that of me, being alive. I stayed for what felt like an eternity then felt my way along the wall back to the door. I had been in the room a mere four minutes.
Dr. Woods’ point had been that silence is a necessary part of music and he wanted us to experience silence so we would appreciate the presence of rests amidst a flurry of sound. Music, he explained, finds its life not in the cacophony of notes and sounds as we might layer them together, but in those brief moments of silence, the rests, especially when unexpected, that allow us to catch our breath.
I can’t say I learned a great deal from the remainder of that class. Electronic music was still finding its roots and our resources, which had been borrowed, were painfully limited. Dr. Woods soon left for a teaching position at a university that appreciated his forward thinking and we went on to do other things that had no relationship to our degrees. What stuck, though, was that very important lesson in the virtue of silence.
Life since that moment in 1982 has only gotten increasingly louder. The reason I get up at 4:00 AM every morning to write these articles is because, in relative silence I can think, put words in order, consider what phrasing best communicates an idea, and pull together stories that are, hopefully, worth reading. Outside this morning, the wind is literally howling and the heater is struggling to keep our house warm, but in the absence of children laughing, music playing, or the whole world trying to talk at the same time, there is a peacefulness that gives life amidst the cacophony.
One of the reasons I so dislike presidential election years is the amount of overwhelming noise they generate. Every candidate, especially at this point of the approaching primaries, is shouting as loud as they can, trying to shove their message through the eye of the needle that is our attention span. Add to that all the sports, not just the impending Super Bowl, but all the cricket and the soccer and the basketball going on around the world. There are ads, and movies, and trailers, and … I think someone has a field trip today but I don’t remember which child. Then, there’s laundry and dishes and I suppose I should plan something for dinner because people do need to eat every once in a while. Pictures to schedule and take and edit. Conversations about books and an upcoming deadline and no I’ve not even started that outline. Did I remember to order underwear? I hope so, because I don’t have time to go out and buy more. Rumors that Sarah Burton is leaving Alexander McQueen and going to Dior, are they true? Men’s fashion in Paris, then couture, then, SHOWTIME, a month of ready-to-wear. And …
So. Much. Noise.
Learning the virtuosity of silence doesn’t happen by accident. Too many people ignore the rest signs. We need those quiet places; in our lives, in our thoughts, in our schedules, in our creativity. We need space to take a breath so that we don’t choke on our own lifelong diatribes.
May you find that moment, if not now, soon, where you can experience the virtue of silence. May you find Peace. And thank you, Dr. Woods, wherever you are.
When you see a dog wearing the same outfit as you and the dog wears it better.
When there’s no Pantone® number to match anything you’re wearing.
When people follow you because they’re sure you must be on your way to a circus. 
When you’re wearing fishnet and the park ranger gives you a ticket for carrying over the limit. 
When the tags in all your clothes say “Made In Bangladesh.” 
Don’t rely on the computer to help you make friends.
Sympathy For The Masses
To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.—Ivan Turgenev
Life is not always as comfortable as it appears
I’m wondering this morning how many people consider themselves sympathetic. I’m not talking about how we feel when someone dies, though certainly we could use more sympathy there, but more along the lines of what the Oxford dictionary refers to as, “understanding between people; common feeling.” Sympathy for our fellow humans, for the people right around us, and especially for those we perceive to be different from ourselves, appears to be in a drought.
For example, being a Saturday, one’s expectations might be that people have the day off, their weekend free, two days of leisure available to them. Yet, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, at least 35% of us work on the weekend. Most of those working weekends are in retail, food service, or sales, which is of little surprise. Of those working weekends, though, more than half of those have more than one job, and that particular statistic has grown substantially over the past ten years. I wonder, as we snarl at how slow a waitress seems to be moving or complain about the number of registers open at the market, if we might do well to show a bit of sympathy for those who are overworked, lacking sleep, struggling to make ends meet, but are still expected to smile and meet the petty demands of customers.
I also think about those around us who deal with persistent pain that we never see. When I was a boy, I fear there were too many times when I thought less of my mother because her arthritis forced her to ask for help. While that attitude reversed itself by the time I was an adult, it is only as I find myself frequently in that same predicament that I truly understand how deflating it feels to have to so often ask for assistance. I know many others who deal daily with chronic pain brought on by a plethora of issues; they smile, they rarely complain, they would rather you not know how they’re really feeling. Yet, when they can steal a moment to themselves, they break down and cry in the silence. Do they not deserve sympathy?
As a general population, I fear we have become so incredibly selfish and self-centered that we’ve lost our sympathy for our fellow man. We deride those who struggle. We make fun of those less fortunate. We even delight in placing obstacles in the path of those trying to better themselves. We would rather strip people of their dignity than put an arm around their shoulder and help them out of the ditch into which they’ve fallen. Instead, we chide them for having dared to fall into that ditch in the first place.
Our lack of sympathy became painfully evident in the past week with a local news story that went viral. A woman complained to a local bar that her New Year’s Eve was ruined by what she mistakenly assumed was a dead drug addict being carried from the bar. Her words were scathing and mean as she not only derided the bar, but her over-worked server. When the bar’s manager came back with a scathing reply, explaining that the “dead addict” had in fact been a 72-year-old woman having a heart attack, the entire Internet cheered that the rude woman had received her comeuppance.
There is a shocking lack of sympathy in that story, first from the woman making the complaint, who was so caught up in how “horrible” her night was that she felt compelled to share her anger on social media. Her words were insensitive and uncaring and the manager’s response was sufficient in correcting that wrong. However, we, as a society, are not happy, apparently, until we’ve taken things too far. As the story became one of international interest, people around the world went out of their way to humiliate the woman making the complaint, even inundating the salon where she rented booth space. Notice that I’m using the past tense in that sentence. Because of the severity of the response, the salon canceled her booth rental. The woman now gets to start 2016 without any income.
“She got what she deserved,” is the common response, but did she? She deserved to be corrected in the same manner as she complained, and that happened rather swiftly. But to think that she, or anyone, deserves to be shamed internationally, to have financial harm inflicted not only on her but on others, who worked at the same salon, demonstrates a global lack of sensitivity, compassion, and sympathy even greater than that which she exhibited herself. Some have said, “I hope she’s learned her lesson,” and I would assume she has, but clearly the rest of the world has not. There is no good reason for the shaming to continue nor for her name to be dragged through the mud of international media.
Throughout my life, I’ve made plenty of mistakes, errors in judgment, outright acts of willful ignorance. Chances are pretty damn high that you’ve done the same. None of us are proud of those moments. We learn our lessons, hopefully, and move on. We all work hard. With the economic devastation of the middle class, the number of people struggling just to put food on the table has increased, despite yesterday’s news that the economy added 292,000 new jobs in December. Simply having a job, or two, is not necessarily sufficient for sustaining a reasonable quality of life.
For 98 percent of us, life is a continual race from one challenge to another. We all have our struggle. We all experience pain we don’t talk about. So doesn’t it just make sense that we should have sympathy for the masses that share our common condition?
A little sympathy and caring goes a long way. Try it.
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