Unfixing Silence

Oct 31, 2024

I press the one-minute button twice and the microwave's inside chamber lights up in warm yellow. Aside from distant chatter coming through the living room window, the apartment is quiet, and it feels like there isn’t much happening beyond the pyrex bowl turning in the oven. My eyes rest on the broccoli and oyster mushrooms steaming inside. The moment feels very still. The small digits read 01:42 when my first noticeable thought intrudes.

It’s an image of Antonia shutting her door in my face. Of me in the hallway, standing between my room and hers, stunned mid-sentence. The scene loops back in my mind, tinged with frustration and dripping with disappointment.

Within seconds, the stillness has given way to a barrage of thoughts.

I have nothing to figure out about the situation, nothing to plan or process. The friction of our interaction won’t get resolved by my thinking about it. I know this, and I yield to the thoughts anyway, pulling me into the labyrinth of my mind, chasing one seductive idea after another—”I’m important!” each one says—and building up avatars of my righteous self and her unjust attitude, reinforcing my bitter point of view, justifying the apology I feel I’m owed.

A labyrinth has an end. There is no end to thinking. The possibilities of the narrative I could weave are exhaustingly endless.

By the time the microwave is done, I find myself in a state so different that the pull of my thinking feels violent in retrospect.

Whether I notice it or not, stillness pervades my days—when I first open my eyes in bed, after every exhale, or in the seconds after I stand up from my desk. I disconnect from many of these moments either by zoning out or thinking, almost on autopilot. But in some contexts, like in music, I find stillness much easier to be with.

Sometimes, a tune comes to a halt and then resumes, or changes direction. Sometimes, it halts to come back even stronger. Other times, the stillness feels like silence, even though there are sounds present—through a change of rhythm, or an instrumental solo dissolving.

Nicolas Jaar makes frequent use of stillness in his compositions. His song Aquí comes to rest several times, for fractions of a second, and I find myself suspended in a sonic fog each time, with no urge to fill the pause with thoughts. I carry on being without anticipating what comes next—a textured rumble, a distorted screech, or his voice gently singing, “qué significa ser de verdad aquí?”

“What does it mean to be truly here?”1

Stillness is a choice musicians make, and I find it easy to trust. Something will come next. Something always comes next.

Embracing stillness in day to day life is also a choice. Thinking does have its utility: how else would I plan my day or solve a Wordle? But I often act as if thinking is the only choice. As if I need to fix every silence with my thoughts.

The choice seems justified when strong emotions fuel and shape my thoughts, but looking at my thoughts and the situations they project, my emotional fuel feels more like an excuse. My thinking, my ruminations and projections, rarely solve anything. They’re just background noise taking center stage.

There’s a lot of background noise that robs me, you, us of the experience of life, of being here, even when ‘here’ is as unglamorous as two minutes spent standing by a microwave. We spend too much time preoccupying ourselves with abstractions and assumptions, with creating mental images of people, things and events elapsed or ahead.

I’m learning instead, as one of my teachers says, to trust the immediacy of my embodied existence. I’m learning that this moment is ok as it is. That it’s unnecessary to fill stillness with restless thoughts. There is no need to fix silence. It isn’t broken.

In Aquí, Nicolas Jaar actually sings, “Qué significa ser de verdad de aquí?” What does it mean to truly be from here? Not hearing “de,” I initially thought he was singing, “what does it mean to be truly here?”