How often do you allow yourself to wait around without your phone in hand glaring into its screen? I know how easy it is to reach for your phone while waiting in line at the bank or even waiting for the water to boil so you can fill the void of time before steeping your tea and carrying your hot mug back to your desk to move on to the next thing.
But there is something beautiful about standing in silence in a moment that’s too easy to become overstimulated with social media, podcasts, or, God forbid, the news. Don’t get me wrong, fill the air with all the beauty and information in the world. Do what you please, but there is something so peaceful about the silence or, at least, the simple noises of the day-to-day that can tickle your ear drums when you stand there and look around slowly and curiously without the constant search to be fed by noise and bright, flashy videos.
There are at least a few sounds that tingle just the right way maybe because they come and go naturally, intermittently dispersed through time like a beautiful song. Like:
-Trucks driving out on the road
-Birds chirping
-Dogs barking while out on their walk
-Tea kettles boiling and growing in intensity as heat accumulates
-Your loved ones in the next room humming, turning pages, rummaging through their things
-Your feet on the ground as you mosey the kitchen, passing the time
Not to mention, in silence, in slowness, there are all the ways you can become aware of your body when you limit the constant distractions.
There is:
-Your breath
Or perhaps:
-A sniffling nose.
-Supportive or unsupportive ankles
-Possible tension in the hips; the release of tension from the hips
-A bubble under the ribs
-A kink in the neck
-Big expansive lungs
-The way only one nostril lets air in and out, but just one
-(New) awareness of the occipital lobe
-Overgrown cuticles
-Chipped fingernail polish
-A flexible spine
It’s not always obviously beautiful, and it can be uncomfortable to stand in the slowness and grow steadily more aware of yourself and your quiet surroundings. Sometimes feelings and awareness bubble up in a surprising way that might appear as though it’s trying to startle you, but it’s just communication. It’s good old-fashioned communication.
And also, in the quiet, there are things in plain sight that are too easy to overlook or forget, even though they are right in front of your face. Suddenly you are open to see things that your eyes don’t always register.
Like:
-Books on the shelves that call your name.
-Expressions on a person’s faces
-Signs from the Universe
-Photos on the wall
-Dust on the shelves
-A lost crumb on the floor
-Lines in the wood created by God and turned into a table by God knows who
-Your pup looking out the window or looking at you
-Steam rising
Oh, To be bored for even a moment. It can seem rare these days. It’s easy to grow busier and busier to fill each moment with a sound, a bit of information fed through the screen at such a rate you can want to explode, book it up the hill, or even scream.
But what about letting in some boredom and quiet, making space to explore the moment fully? What about waiting without your phone in hand even when you don’t know exactly where to go next in thought or curiosity or exploration, so you wait a little more or glance around, and then it comes to you but isn’t force-fed to you?
Sometimes the reality of the physical can seem dull after staring into a sparkly iPhone for 100 hours straight, but that dullness wears off, and you’re left with art, poetry, and a dance of life right here and now in real-time at a proper pace. Slow, steady, patient, and sometimes appearing boring but magic lives there with wide open channels for divine messages to flood you.
Please know, you will not fall behind for not filling your eyes and ears with noise from the world. Observing the world, while waiting around, instead of constantly digesting staticky information will not make you uninformed. In fact, quite the opposite. Perhaps you’ll be satiated because you soaked in and ate up the day and allowed it to show you the way in its slow, steady, somewhat quiet, but sincere way.
