A terrifying silence.

21 Mar

It was like some Attenborough-esque quest to locate a nearly extinct wild animal hiding in a remote wilderness. 

I have traversed over 21,000km - a combination of planes, cars, even by foot,  finally dragging a laden blue snowsled deep into the unhinged Laplandian Arctic.  All to immerse myself in something that appears almost extinct in the modern world. 

Silence.

Not the kind of silence that comes from having the kids in bed and the TV off.

This is a deep silence that permeates every fibre. It’s startling in its weight and expanse. 

In those moments when the wind was stilled and the Earth unmoved, there was literally nothing but my laboured breath and pounding heartbeat, perhaps the slightest crunch of ice and snow underfoot as my body shifted ever so slightly under the harnessed load. 

No humans as far as the eye could see. And we could see far. Nature frozen and bent under the yoke of winter. 

Sound can be measured in decibels - but true silence is not simply a score of zero. In its purest form, silence is an ideal. A notion, Even a resource.

Its extinction comes not from predation or habitat destruction. We have pushed silence into the far reaches of the world out of sheer terror. We have constructed lives and habits and all manner of devices to avoid being left alone with…well, ourselves.

We are constantly looking for fresh purpose to draw our attention outwards, to achieve escape velocity from introspection.

Because being alone and undistracted - is simply too terrifying.

The terror stems from two angles. Firstly, silence leaves us with nothing but the internal conversation. No distraction, no ‘urgent’ need to attend to. Nothing. The sheer prospect of what may surface in those moments for many is a concept too unfathomable to bear.

The second fear comes from outright boredom. The dire need to be doing something, even if that something is as pointless and mind numbing as scrolling the many and varied curated stills of other peoples supposed lives. 

Experiential poverty. If I'm bored I clearly lack purpose. And with lack of purpose must come lack of drive and ambition. Unworthy of the unforgiving minute. How can I post about my successful life if I can’t even muster sufficient importance to be busy right now?

Truth is true power lies in being unborable. 

To move through the mundane and numbing and even pointless - to arrive at the other side and reflect on the beauty of movement, or clarity of undistracted thought. 

To have the mental endurance of a heavy stone. 

To weather the unimaginably mundane and not be bothered in the slightest. 

To welcome the quietest of voices from the deepest recesses of the soul.

This is the way.