Embracing Silence

"The world’s secrets are hidden inside silence."

                                                             _Erling Kagge

Erling Kagge’s book. Silence in the Age of Noise, came to me at a time when I was trying to to switch off the noise in my head, whether this noise was sounds or mental clutter. We live in an era of hyper-connectivity. We are inundated with information, texts, emails. We are constantly waiting for the next notification, scrolling our phone screen for the latest updates.  Day and night, sounds and light flowing at us from our many screens. It  never was easy for me to concentrate, but in the past year or so, it became harder. A few months ago, I realised it takes me forever to fall asleep at night. I couldn’t relax, my mind seemed to fly in a thousand different directions at once. Even on holidays, it was very difficult to actually switch off. It was exhausting. It was during a trip in Namibia that I was started thinking about the noise. It was my first encounter with the Namib desert; the immensity of this beautiful country, the open spaces,  the privilege to be able to stare at the sky at night without the bright disturbances of our civilization, but mostly, the total silence, made an indelible impression on my mind. I had only my phone with me, but with no internet and, sometimes, with no electricity, it was useless. I started noticing things, the shape of the clouds, the song of the birds, the sound of rustling in the leaves of the trees, the sluggish movement of the animals under the desert sun. The incredible stillness of the landscape. It makes you pause, and this pausing, I discovered, bring you calmness and joy.  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry came to mind: “One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing, yet through the silence something throbs and gleams…” It was there, in the desert, that I thought about the amount of noise we consume on a daily basis. The time and the resources we spend on social media, reading every irrelevant tweet or post, the needless distractions, the unrest of missing something important that almost  never happens. It was there, in the desert, that I made my mind. To embrace silence. It takes time and determination to reduce the amount of noise in our lives. But it totally worth it. When I sat down to write this note I had just finished Erling Kagge’s wonderful and inspiring book, Silence in Age of the Noise. I was thinking to write a short review, yet my mind wandered  in the stillness of the desert. The extraordinary life of Kagge, his experiences, and his obsession with silence, not only made me want to tell my own story, it has also increased my determination to embrace silence.

“Silence in itself is rich. It is exclusive and luxurious. A key to unlock new ways of thinking. I don't regard it as a renunciation or something spiritual, but rather as a practical resource for living a richer life. Or to put it in more ordinary terms, as a deeper form of experiencing life that just turning the TV to watch the news, again.”

_ Erling Kagge