Dear family, friends, and Internet strangers,
I’ve been thinking about silence lately.
I think of the good silence that gives space to think, to pray, to sleep, or to hear another person talk.
I think of the unpleasant silence of unanswered questions, the letter that never comes, the text message left on “read”. The silence of rejection, or death, or busyness, or failures in communication.
I think of the sinful silence that feeds injustice, where, like Esther in the Bible, we are tempted to think of ourselves first.
I think of the times God Himself seems silent.
I used to say things like, “Of course God speaks. How could we believe in Him if He were silent?” But God is God in the silence. He was God in the four hundred years between Malachi and Matthew. He is worth believing regardless of our own perception of His voice, or the lack of it.
He is God when I cannot or will not hear Him, when my perception of His silence is inaccurate, and based on my dwelling in the midst of noise.
I’m sensitive to noise of all kinds. I like when the HVAC system and the refrigerator stop and there is no sound at all in the house. Nuisance noises, like dogs barking, drive me crazy. And I don’t like other kinds of noise—visual noise, for example, like the piles of unmade decisions we call “clutter” that are slowly eating my house. Or too much worthless information (social media, marketing emails, memes) fracturing my attention span. I turn off notifications here, unsubscribe from marketing emails there, put things away, recycle things, throw things out.
But the noise comes back.
If the noise level raises slowly, in the background, maybe I don’t notice right away. I don’t notice the air conditioning noise until it turns off. I don’t notice how much of my to-do list is unnecessary until something forces me to stop doing some of it. I don’t notice how much of my thought process is occupied by noise until I get away from the causes of it.
Signal and silence, valuable input and the space between, is what I want. So how do I reduce the noise? How do I reasonably reduce the distractions, all the worthless pulls on my concentration?
Silence, Noise, and Surprises
Shortly after my last monthly Substack went out, Ed and I went to Florida with a bunch of friends—and all their children—for vacation. We stayed together in a gigantic house, with plans to visit Walt Disney World most days and chill by the pool or play games in between.
The trip was a lot of fun, and I think we all thoroughly enjoyed Disney. There were beautiful and interesting things to look at and to try everywhere. Epcot is my favorite part of Walt Disney World, and we were there during the Flower Festival, so it was extra lovely and extra educational. Besides the usual World Showcase food, art, and architecture, plus The Land and The Seas (where the cuttlefish, tucked away in a fish nursery, are my long-time favorite), we also enjoyed food at event booths, looked at themed flower gardens, and walked through a butterfly tent.
We walked my feet to non-functioning levels on multiple days across the parks. We rode rides (the best is Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind) and were immersed in Galaxy’s Edge, the massive Star Wars area at Hollywood Studios. We saw trees full of egrets at Epcot, and watched small yellow birds build nests at Animal Kingdom. We saw fancy pigeons with peacock-style crowns in one of the aviaries, and a pile of baby ducks napping near the park entrance. We ate all manner of delicious food across all the parks and at Disney Springs.
We spent most of this time with the friends we went with, sometimes as a large group and sometimes a small fraction of the horde. When we were back at the house, we were likely to run into friends whenever we were in the kitchen or outside. When Ed and I were on our own, it was a welcome break, like a date, rather than our daily default.
It was much more walking, less sleep, more crowds, less time alone, more sun (90° Fahrenheit in March—no, I don’t miss living in Florida), and more mental stimulation than I normally encounter at home, and I still had no migraines and few tension-type headaches.
On top of all that, some unexpected circumstances arose almost as soon as we got there that made my usual constant planning impossible, and we had to take everything day by day. Though we had Disney tickets and reservations, what had happened created uncertainty about what we would be able to use. It also tossed the next leg of the trip, our typical visit to friends and family on the coast, entirely into the air.
In the end, despite all expectations to the contrary, I felt that an ongoing noise in my brain had quieted.
I don't remember the last time I felt like a vacation was truly a vacation like this. My body was tired when we got home, but my mind felt rested.
Let me paint you a picture: Two weeks before we all drove down, I was anxious that our overnight hotel near Atlanta wasn’t booked yet. I try to secure overnight accommodations for anything at least six weeks ahead of time to ensure we have a decent place to stay.
By the end of the Disney leg of the trip, Ed and I knew we needed to adjust our Melbourne itinerary. We had to find a new place to stay, change plans with friends, and cancel others just a few days before we arrived. And this time, I was fine booking a hotel the day before. The day before.
That’s minimal stress about something that was inconceivable to me only a few weeks prior. That suggests something happened in between.
I keep thinking about what went right. I have theories. We certainly had less screen time, more outdoors, so much walking, more joy-directed time with friends, and lots of input for new ideas. This is all different from our day-to-day at home, but I don’t know that those characteristics were that different from other vacations. And of course Disney World is just more everything.
The least-expected, and perhaps biggest, distinction that I see compared to our other trips was less planning, more presence, or maybe what people refer to as “mindfulness”, which I’ve never been able to do.
The useful thought I had when this trip was getting surprising was, “I don’t worship my plans, or my vacation; I worship God.” It kept me grounded in truth. Whatever happened next did not have to be frustrating. God was with me, even in apparent chaos. It wasn’t about me, or about my plans, but God and His plans. Even if nothing went as planned. And that meant I did not need to anticipate the things I couldn’t anticipate. I knew—more or less—that I could safely let it go.
So, when we were at the Disney parks or Disney Springs, I was at Disney. I was as present with people as I could be, given my particular exhaustion levels. I was expecting delight almost every moment and I wasn’t disappointed (until I was crying in the parking lot because my feet hurt and I still had to make it to the car). I was flexible and defaulting to something like joy, and saving nothing for the next day because there were no guarantees we’d be back another day.
On rest days, I really rested. There was no wondering if my actions were optimally productive when I slept in, took a nap, or spent time with the friends who were in the house with us. One night I was the only person left outside, and I set a timer for ten minutes to remain in undistracted prayer. I saw the sun set, the sky change colors, the clouds change shape. I took one photo to invite Ed to join me outside, but otherwise left my phone alone.
I don't think there is something wrong with planning in general. I know "no plan survives first contact with the enemy" and I don’t think I hold my plans too tightly. Whether a book outline or an event plan, I have observed how having a plan to adapt from is better than starting from zero at every moment, and I thought I was adequately adaptable.
It seems there’s an optimal level of planning and my tendency to go beyond it has created less productivity and less creativity. People need room for surprises, whether that’s a burst of inspiration, unexpected exhaustion, a phone call, a task taking longer than expected, power outages, internet failures, anything.
Jesus clearly had space for His plans to be interrupted. The Samaritan in Jesus’s famous parable let his plans get interrupted.
But maybe the quieted brain-sound wasn’t directly about the reduction in planning. Maybe it was the “mindfulness”. Maybe it was the grace of God for me, especially for this trip. Maybe being dropped repeatedly in the Tower of Terror soothes my soul.
I think there’s something I can learn from this that I can use moving forward. Certainly my understanding of “noise” and “quiet” is challenged. Can adding more mental stimulation reduce the noise in my head?
There’s a study from several years ago in the Journal of Consumer Psychology (sadly not available through JSTOR’s free access, but SciHub has it) that suggests neurotic people may get relaxation benefits from environments full of “anxiety-associated cues”, and that it’s not as simple as urban vs. natural environments when seeking mental restoration.
It makes me wonder if my noisy brain paradoxically needs noise, or at least more information, of certain types, at certain times, to quiet itself. It makes me think the quiet-signal-noise model isn’t even appropriate.
Maybe your model could use challenging. When’s the last time you were surprised by the amount of noise—high or low—in your own mind? What may have caused it? What did you do about it, and why?
You’ll notice, if you’re reading this in the archive, that there is nowhere for you to comment. The reason is clear: comments online tend to be mostly noise. There are specific situations (recipes) where I appreciate comments, and I don’t plan to do those on this Substack. The questions I include are not for “engagement” for the blog to earn search-engine points. They’re just for you.
(If you’re receiving this as an email, and you’re a subscriber, you are able to reply, but that’s not their purpose, either.)
If you’ve been reading for a few months, you’ll likely remember I started this Substack to help reduce my social media time. That’s related to this desire to reduce what is definitely noise, things that distract without adding enough benefits to matter. Some of this is thanks, in part, to author Cal Newport’s “Any-Benefit Fallacy”. He describes the popular, unproductive idea that a tool is worth using if it has any conceivable benefit, or if not using it may cause us to “miss out”, even if the costs outweigh the apparent good, and he suggests we try a “Craftsman Approach” instead, which seeks the best tools for each job. (See his books Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. Both of these are affiliate links through Amazon; you can also seek his books at ThriftBooks or elsewhere.)
I deactivated my Instagram a few months ago, a decision I intend to evaluate this summer, when I plan to decide whether to delete it fully. I’m spending less time on other attention-splintering forms of media (Facebook, Pinterest), and continuing to seek ways to drop things like that.
Writing and Other Updates
After a rough first quarter, with an unusual amount of migraines and then a lot of tension headaches, I’m doing notably better. I’m building more dedicated time into my weekly schedule for writing my novel, I’m working on a short story that I may or may not submit for a particular publication (there’s a short deadline), and I’m still editing that one sci-fi book.
Progress feels lovely. The absence of pain feels lovely, frankly. I wish I knew what’s different so I don’t have to return to the Pain Zone.
A 2020 Easter poem
During Easter weekend 2020, I wrote a poem to process the odd silence of the holiday while in lockdown. All the cultural norms had disappeared, and my attempts to save some version of those things for myself, like trying to make deviled eggs, didn’t turn out, either. There was nothing left but the Gospel truth: the tomb was, and remains, empty. I like to revisit this poem from time to time, especially at this time of year, and I thought I’d share it with you:
Resurrection Sunday
It’s not about egg hunts canceled by the rain and this long pandemic, nor about the deviled eggs that I made all wrong, nor the ham we won’t be eating, nor the fancy dresses made for gathering in front of acquaintances, nor people in bunny suits (the rabbit kind or the clean room kind), nor flowers of any kind including the Kingsblood tulips that failed to come up for who knows what reason.
That’s it for April.
If any of this was valuable to you, share it with someone!
To truth, love, and adventure,
Rae