It is as if a symphony, with all its rests, attenuated beats, and rhythms, suddenly had all silence between the notes removed, leaving the notes undifferentiated, crushed and bruised, each sound pressed into the next. Without silence, work isn t music, but a mechanical hum, like an old refrigerator, the white noise corroding our attempts at a real conversation and noticed only in the reverberating kitchen, when it finally brings itself to a shuddering stop. We are each surrounded by an enormous silence that can be a blessing and a help to us, a silence in which the skein of reality is knitted and unraveled to be knit again, in which the perspectives of our work can be enlarged and enriched. Silence is like a cradle holding our endeavors and our will. A silent spaciousness sustains us in our work and at the same time connects us to larger worlds, which in the busyness of our daily struggle to achieve, we haven t yet investigated.
Silence is the soul s break for freedom.
Most people who exhibit mastery in a work or a subject often have left it completely for a long period, only to return for another look. Constant busyness has no absence in it, no openness to the arrival of any new season, no birdsong at the start of its day. Constant learning is counterproductive and makes both us and the subject stale and uninteresting. Our relationship to time has become corrupted exactly because we allow ourselves very little experience of the timeless. We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief.