Silence Between the Notes

We spend a lot of time talking about silence as though everyone has access to it.

Find a quiet place. Sit in the silence. Listen to the silence between the notes.

Lovely.

My tinnitus would like a word.

Some of us never quite experience silence.

There is a high-pitched sound in my ears that has been there long enough to become part of the landscape. Most of the time I don't need it to disappear. I simply need it to move down the list of things demanding my attention.

Sometimes nonsense television works beautifully.

A crime mystery. A few Karens behaving badly. Something interesting enough to give my attention another place to rest.

The ringing is still there.

It has simply been demoted.

Once Executive Vice President of LISTEN TO THIS, tinnitus has been reassigned to basement office B-101.

No windows.

No staff.

Microphone access denied.

That may not sound very spiritual.

Good.

Because I don't think peace requires us to float somewhere above ordinary human life.

Years ago, I learned about the Witness, the part of us capable of observing a thought without immediately becoming the thought. I understood the concept.

Understanding it and living it turned out to be two very different things.

Life went on. Noise happened. I wandered away from the practice and came back to it later when simply knowing about it was no longer enough.

I had to practice.

And somewhere in that practice, silence began to mean something different to me.

It wasn't necessarily the absence of sound.

It was space.

Music gives us a wonderful example.

We hear the notes, but the spaces between them help give the music its shape. Remove every interval, every rest, every breath, and what remains isn't richer because there is more sound.

It is noise.

Life can be like that.

A thought arrives.

A feeling follows.

Someone says something.

The phone rings.

Something crashes downstairs.

Ego has an announcement.

Mr. Procrastination appears carrying something fascinating that apparently needs my immediate attention.

The Thought Police blow a whistle because somebody had an unauthorized thought.

And somewhere upstairs, the Witness is yelling:

“Can you be quiet down there?”

The house does not become silent because I learned to observe my thoughts.

The kids are still downstairs screaming for Kool-Aid. Somebody is riding a Big Wheel through the hallway with playing cards clipped to the spokes. There is knocking from somewhere, although nobody seems to know which door.

And tinnitus is still in B-101 going:

EEEEEEEEEEEE.

The difference is that I don't have to run downstairs every time somebody makes a noise.

There is the space.

Not somewhere above me.

Not somewhere I ascend to after becoming sufficiently enlightened.

Right here, in the middle of the commotion.

That space lets me notice what happened before deciding what happens next.

Observe.

Pause.

Discern.

Choose.

The first thought may be automatic.

The next move does not have to be.

That doesn't mean every interruption can be politely ignored.

Sometimes life pulls up outside with a wood chipper.

A wood chipper does not request a basement office.

A wood chipper wants the auditorium.

LOOK AT ME. I AM CHIPPING SHIT.

Years ago, moles plagued my gardens. When the wood chipper moved in, I became convinced they dug three feet deeper just to escape the vibration.

I understood.

Sometimes something really is loud.

Sometimes it deserves our attention for a while.

Acceptance isn't pretending we cannot hear the damn wood chipper.

It is recognizing that the wood chipper is currently chipping and deciding what, if anything, we need to do about it.

Then returning our attention when we can.

Maybe that's why I like the idea of silence between the notes.

The silence doesn't replace the notes.

Without the notes, there is no music.

Without the spaces, there is no shape.

And maybe peace isn't finally getting everyone downstairs to shut up.

Maybe it's realizing I don't have to answer every knock.

I took a photograph in a diner once.

There were people all around me. Conversations. Chairs. Shoes. Movement. Ordinary life happening above the floor.

But what caught my attention was underneath it.

Light.

Shadows.

Empty spaces between chair legs and people.

For one moment, I stopped looking at what everyone was doing and noticed what existed between them.

Nothing in the diner had to become quiet for me to see it.

Neither did I.

Maybe that is the silence between the notes.

Not the absence of life.

The space that lets us hear the music.