Friday, December 06, 2002

Learning to Shut Up

Recently, I have been trying to shut up long enough to learn to become a Quaker. For the past few months, one of my willing daughters and I have taken most Sunday mornings to sit in the company of others in chairs neatly arranged in a square, experiencing silence. At Quaker Meeting, people are sometimes moved to speak, but only when they can improve upon the silence. I have not spoken yet. I am mostly trying to pay attention to the unexpected fullness of that silence. It is not easy to shut up long enough to really listen to yourself, particularly at the start of another noisy, merry, fa-la-la holiday season, particularly with drumbeats of war in the background.

This silence runs counter to most of my experiences. Like many people, I had to work hard as a child to learn to make noise, to speak up, to take the risk of making my views known. I learned these lessons too well, perhaps, and have grown into a person who is all too ready to leap, jester-like, into uncomfortable gaps in any conversation.

It’s not just any silence that I’m trying to learn. Silence can be negative, of course—it can be a symptom of feeling inadequate, unworthy, oppressed. It can be aggressive and mean and withholding, or passively acquiescent. Think back: childhood friendships are peppered with those bitter moments. I can remember being both victor and vanquished in the face of the snappy playground retort: “Silence is golden, so shut up and get rich!” What I’m trying to learn, and what I have seen at Quaker Meeting, is something quite different: It is the silence of people who are doing the hard work of listening to themselves, to their hearts, to their lives, and to the lives of others. It is a rich, generous, listening silence—simultaneously unsettling and healing.

I am increasingly aware of how much growing up means learning not to say the things we’d often like to say. The moments I’m least proud of as a friend, a sister, a spouse, and especially a parent are times when I’ve said too much rather than too little, trying to fix something too quickly with tidying-up phrases, or squeezing in a final word. Now, when I’m reading children’s books aloud to my daughters, I linger like an anxious apprentice over tender scenes to see what those fictional Good Parents say to their lucky children when they are in need. I discover again and again that the wise Mas and Pas and Marmies in those pages often know just when to shut up—when to offer the comfort of silence, a warm lap, and a stroking hand, rather than leaping to confirm or analyze or fix or smooth over. In that silence, the child’s voice or tears can reverberate and both the child and parent can really listen. That silence is instructive for everyone.

Teachers often forget just how instructive silence can be, and we have to be convinced, we have to remind ourselves, how important it is to shut up and create space in the classroom for students to hesitate, to think quietly for long enough that the result is genuine contemplation, rather than its poor relation, quick-wittedness. New teachers are often told to count slowly to ten after they ask a question, so they won’t nervously leap in to fill the seeming void, and it’s not a bad conversational rule in other settings, too. I’ll be curious to see if the celebrated teacher in the new film The Emperor’s Club is shown shutting up long enough for his students to think, silently, or if once again a “good teacher” is depicted as an eccentric conducting himself wildly in the orchestra of his own brilliant language.

There’s an irony in attempting to practice silence in the jingle-bell-noisiest part of the year. My daughters take the more popular stance: “Silence? Schmilence!” so at our house, my reflective quietude is set against the backbeat of, let’s see, those festive dogs: [Music: barking dogs]. And let’s not forget the rodents: [Music: Chipmunks]. Ah, yes—this was the backdrop the other day while the girls action-figured the nativity set and argued over whether Jesus might have said “PU” when he smelled the frankincense or whether he would have used the more “elegant” and “old-fashioned” phrasing, “I don’t care for the aroma of this gift.”

Despite the noise, here’s what I’m prescribing for myself this season: the gift of silence—being present, listening generously to others and to my conscience. I am holding in my head an image of our leaders and our citizens sitting in the company of other world leaders and their citizens, in chairs neatly arranged in a non-hierarchical square, all of us shutting up long enough to experience silence, and speaking only when we can improve upon it. Out of that silence would come something disquieting, something instructive, something that might be the beginning of healing.

For Michiana Chronicles, this is April Lidinsky [Mahalia Jackson - “Silent Night"].

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on December 06, 2002
Permalink • Printer Friendly
Google
WWW Michiana Chronicles

A random pick from more than 460 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:

April Lidinsky -- Learning to Shut Up / More essays by April

Joe Chaney -- More essays by Joe

Ken Smith -- More essays by Ken

Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- More essays by Jeanette

Heather Curlee Novak -- More essays by Heather

David James -- More essays by David

Elizabeth Van Jacob -- More essays by Elizabeth

Jeff Nixa -- More essays by Jeff

Louise Collins -- More essays by Louise

Jonathan Nashel -- More essays by Jonathan