Cultivating silence

Cultivating silence will help you to truly hear.

Life is noisy. Phones ring, notifications beep, and many of us wear headphones on a daily basis, blocking out unwanted noise with new noise.

Sitting in an airplane with nowhere to go, you can see how much we rely on “noise” to avoid silence. We watch terrible movies or listen to podcasts rather than sit in silence and contemplate the terrain of our own thoughts. But why turn our minds over to distracting noise when we could instead take advantage of the great riches that silence offers us?

Those riches are something that experimental music composer John Cage understood profoundly. Cage had always been fascinated by silence. In 1928, during a high school speaking competition, he even argued that the United States should establish a national day of quiet. It was the beginning of a life spent exploring what silence truly means.

Cage’s most famous creation, titled 4’33, is a composition with a twist: it’s a four-minute, thirty-three-second-long stretch of uninterrupted silence.

During a pianist’s first performance of the piece, the audience sat listening to the silence. During the first movement of the piece, they could hear the wind outside the hall. During the second, raindrops pattered on the roof.

After the performance, Cage pointed out something important. Silence, he said, doesn’t really exist;  what we think of as silence isn’t actually silent, because it’s full of accidental sounds. By giving people silence, Cage was helping them to start actually hearing.

There’s a lesson there for all of those whose lives are too noisy. Silence, or an absence of noise, can help us to refocus and to find clarity. To find stillness.

Leadership expert Randall Stutman, who works with CEOs and Wall Street leaders, once studied how business big shots recharge during their time off. The key, he discovered, lay in spending time in environments with minimal noise, enjoying activities like long-distance cycling, swimming or scuba diving. There, these leaders recharged by escaping from the voices that cluttered their working lives.

Dialing down the noise like this helps us discover a deeper awareness of what’s around us. That could mean simple awareness of the rain on the roof as a pianist sits silently at a piano. Or it could mean the answers to your business problems, which pop into your head during your twentieth mile on the bike.