Words: Clare Dwyer Hogg
Image: Barney Beech
I’ve known for some time,theoretically, that having quiet time is vital. It’s so obvious. Increasingly, I’m valuing inner personal peace above other things. Yet when I think on it, there have been times in my life when it has been conspicuous by its absence. I’m discovering that silence, the time to be quiet, has more than a theoretical link to that.
I think noticing a lack of silence only comes if you’re conscious of making it happen. Otherwise something that has no space in your life has no voice to be missed. The thing is, silence – quiet time with yourself – is where your own voice emerges. And if you haven’t got the space to hear your own voice, how can you discover how to grow?
I’m not thinking about knowing how you feel in response to circumstances – there will always be feelings. But enough feeling rising up and swirling around, without a proportionate amount of quiet with which to reflect, and there’s trouble. The multiple voices you have articulating various reflexive responses will just add to the chatter of everyone else’s voice in your own mind. We’re constantly imbibing sound and opinion and noise: what would a step out of the sound waves allow for, but deeper thought? This isn’t about intellectualism. It’s about the practice of being alone with your own thoughts and listening to what they’re doing.
The simplicity of this makes it hard. Practically, for a start. How to factor in some quiet time each day? Before everyone wakes up? And how does that work when sleep is precious? (I did it that way for a while, every other day. I would go to bed earlier the night before getting up.) Or maybe 30 minutes in the middle of the day works better, radio off and phone on silent. There are ways to manage it. To focus, sometimes I write down what I’m thinking about. Not like a diary – I never want to read back it over it: more like a tool to reveal to myself what is going on. (It’s surprising how many solutions to problems I’ve discovered this way, when my brain is given enough space to actually think something through.)
We find ourselves existing in a time where there is a real drive to output – texts, emails, social media… Cultivating inner space is often left to the end
It’s startlingly difficult to prioritise making space over other things, but thinking about what I do prioritise makes me marvel. We find ourselves existing in a time where there is a real drive to output – think of all the texts, emails and social media we deliver. Simultaneously, there is the great invitational pull to input to ourselves: from other people’s social media, outside communication, news – the list is long. Cultivating inner space is often left to the end. Or even if I think it is a priority, I tend to consider it in the terms dictated by the former output and input world: that I cultivate myselfby imbibing as much information and experience as possible.
All of the above have validity. But without my own space as a cultivated place, there is no room for me, the actual me, to breathe. And without that, the reflectivity I need in order to walk well where I find myself, will not be available to me. That’s when I will tend to act reflexively, to feel keenly without resolution, and to have threads with loose ends that get tangled, without understanding why I feel knotted.
If, however, I cultivate the silence, there is a quiet place to consider the maelstrom. It won’t always conjure up answers, but if it doesn’t, it will often give me a direction to follow. Even if the direction is not clear, the thoughts about how and why I’m thinking in certain ways will be.
Space to consider is invaluable. My ideal is to live out of that space. It starts by carving out an allotted time every day, or every few days. Once that is in place, the space that has been created is kept alive by regular use. Dwelling out of it is a different way of life. Sometimes I manage it. So that even when there is tumult – whether that means being in a chaotic environment, or a challenging mental state – I have a sense that on a deeper level within myself the space is there.
It’s the difference between feeling that I’m trapped in a pinball machine of emotions with nowhere to go, and knowing that no matter what happens, the space is there, grounding me, and that is where calm resides. It makes a difference to me and to those around me. Like I said, it’s an ideal, but until I think about how I want to live, I won’t think about the steps to put that in place.
