I read an article recently about the increasing scarcity of quiet spaces in this world (“Quiet, Please” by Leslee Goodman), and I was surprised to read that even in the middle of the most remote National Forest in the United States, you cannot find more than five minutes of time without hearing a human-made sound, mostly jets flying overhead. There are now fewer than twenty places in the world where you might experience silence for longer than that. Being the critical thinker that I am, I simply was not going to be convinced until I tested that theory. I live in a very quiet area. I can’t see any of my neighbors’ houses, or the street. I live on a private road which doubles as my driveway, and there are no businesses nearby. It’s a rural, wooded area. When I look out the window, all I can see is trees. My yard is always quiet.
So I took a stopwatch out to the back yard and sat down in the grass to experience the delicious silence and solitude I just knew I would find there. I pressed “start.” Five seconds in I heard a car go by; lap 1 on my stopwatch. Twenty-seven seconds later a jet went overhead, and then a smaller plane immediately after that; I paused the stopwatch for nearly six minutes of human-made sound. The next minute and eight seconds I got nothing but birds chirping and the breeze in the leaves, lovely! Then, lap 3, a motorcycle in the distance. Lap 4 only lasted 59 seconds before someone down the street used what sounded like a chainsaw for a few minutes. This went on and on. I sat for nearly an hour like this, and the longest block of true silence, where my ears were confronted with nothing but the sounds of nature, was ONE MINUTE AND THIRTY EIGHT SECONDS. I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t even record five minutes of quiet where I live. And I consider my home to be in a very peaceful, natural place!
This got me thinking about other quiet places I’ve been in my life. If you’ve ever been to Miami, you’ll know there is literally NO quiet there, ever. It is a hot, bright, tightly-packed city with non-stop traffic, music, and people. But one day, while on a trip there, I managed to slip away from the bustle and found myself wandering around an 11th century Spanish monastery (dismantled and shipped overseas by William Hearst in the 1920’s). Built of thick, gray stone, and surrounded by a green space and high stone walls, it was chilly inside the small chapel where I took shelter from a sudden rainstorm. I was completely alone. The chapel was maybe only twelve feet square, just a tiny part of the property. And there, I experienced maybe one of the most profound silences of my life. I sat on a stone bench, my back against the damp wall, the only light coming through a narrow doorway that led to a courtyard crowded with vines and a tiny stained-glass window on the opposite wall. It was like being transported to another world, everything else melting away with the downpour, I was the only person on Earth for that ten minutes of muffled silence. I’ll never forget it. I recognized that moment for the gift that it was and slipped into a quick meditation before the sun and the noise returned.
I’ve experienced quiet in similar spaces; in meditation rooms, temples, and pagodas meant to be used for worship and reflection. The meditation room at the New England Peace Pagoda is a favorite of mine, where I make it a point to slip off my shoes and go in for a quick sit every time I visit. And I've spent many nights up late meditating in front of the Golden Tara in the meditation room at Wonderwell, where you may only hear the groaning of an old building from time to time, and in the winter, the crackling of the logs in the fireplace. It makes me wonder, are these spaces built to be silent because their purpose is spiritual, or do they become spiritual places because they are quiet?
Once, last winter, while shoveling a path to my chicken coop through yet another heavy, wet, three-foot storm, I paused to catch my breath. Leaning on my shovel, with the gigantic flakes chunking down on my hat and the shoulders of my coat, I couldn’t help but notice the silence that came with the storm. Even the leaves didn’t move, no birds, no traffic, just the sound of my own breath, which I tried holding in to honor the depth of the quiet, and the patter of the snowfall. I remember reveling at how lucky I was to live where I could have silence like this, even if only rarely. Of course, then I didn’t know exactly how rare it was!
In the yoga studio, especially in the summer when the windows are open, we are bombarded by sound. Closer to the road, we can hear cars going by regularly. Planes and helicopters pass over, neighbors mow their lawns in the distance, and dogs bark. Last night, during savasana, I tiptoed around and closed all the windows while my clients lay in their meditation, worried that the sounds outside might be a distraction from their practice. After class, I mentioned that I had done so, and one student laughed and said “I don’t even notice that stuff when I’m here, I’m so focused on what we’re doing!” Others nodded in agreement, that they don’t ever hear any of the outside sounds during yoga. This got me thinking about how true it is that the quiet can exist within you even when the outside world is noisy and chaotic. I think about times when I have meditated in airports, and didn’t even notice the baby crying or the person coughing nearby; I was only focused on the bottom of my feet or the movement of my breath. At that moment, I was in a quiet place, even though my physical body was located in a noisy place.
Here we come to the truth of the matter - the world isn’t getting any quieter. And it is unlikely to. Our natural habitat is dying, and every day there are more people, more machines, more construction, and less peace. Our minds are constantly bombarded with lights and noise and thoughts and plans. While we should of course seek to protect and experience naturally quiet places whenever we can, unfortunately they are getting harder and harder to come by. The beautiful thing, though, is that you have control over whether you allow external forces to control and affect you. If we train ourselves to find peace no matter what the circumstances, we will always be able to find five quiet minutes, or ten, or twenty. Meditation is not something that you will automatically be “good at” anytime you feel like it; it’s a skill and needs to be practiced in order to gradually become more effective. At first, you might only sit for five minutes, and all five of them were distracted, but that’s okay! Keep practicing, keep working at it, like a muscle getting stronger and stronger over time, until someday you might find yourself in a crowded public situation and still be in your quiet place.
Your mind is yours, and you do have quite a bit more control over it than you think you do. While thoughts may pop in uninvited, you always have the choice to believe them, to attach to them or to divert your attention where you please. Choose to focus on the quiet. Choose to give attention to your inner stillness. Choose peace.

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