“You’ve got seven months left in this window to get quiet. Calendar it.” This was the directive of the brilliant astrologer-cum-social scientist I Zoom with quasi-annually.
“And then what?” I mutter to myself, pen hovering over the blank square I’ve just drawn around Friday from 9 to 10 on the calendar. This is a little absurd, the scheduling of “nothing,” and I fight the frankly slightly aggressive urge to write “get quiet” into the empty square.
It’s not that I don’t know how to be quiet. It’s that I want to understand the what-for. If I make space, what exactly is supposed to arrive? A clearer mind, a better decision, some kind of soul whisper?
There’s a very cool thing that happens in drumming when you slow a rhythm down. Play it fast and the music is mostly made up of the sounds — the slaps, the tones, the basses. The rhythm lives in the strikes. Slow it down and something changes, even though nothing has changed except the distance between the beats. The no-noise — the rest — becomes part of the composition. Same rhythm. Nothing added, nothing subtracted, but now there is melody where there was rhythm.
I remember being on safari in Kenya and driving around for hours. At one point I asked my husband if there was anything in his mind, because there wasn’t in mine. Literally nothing. Looking, hearing, being, but no mind running interpretive interference. That quiet arrived on its own. This Friday quiet is different. I have to write it in.
I thought maybe the quiet was so I could hear something, from somewhere. But maybe not. Maybe the quiet, the space between the beats, changes the music on its own, just by being there.
The astrologer was clear that the quiet happens in the context of all the other important life beats and action. The invitation wasn’t to a spiritual retreat or a beach escape, and the consequence wasn’t specified. The answer to my “what for?” may be something about just seeing what it feels like when the quiet gets calendared alongside all the activity — when the rest is written into the measure rather than snuck in to catch your breath.
xo Jill