And Silence Reigned

I have been adjusting, for nearly nine months now, to living alone. For the first 24 years of my life, I lived with family members, or in dorms, or in apartments with roommates, and suddenly, at age 25, I found myself in solo housing. Most of the time I like it. I like getting home at the end of the day and not having to be "on", ready to support people and handle crises. The only crises I have to deal with when I get home in the evening are those I created and left in the morning--and there aren't many of those. I don't have to worry about unknowingly being out of milk or TP, no one complains when I leave books cluttering the living room, and I have sole custody of the remote control (and we all know that's important).

There are only two problems with this scenario: Loneliness and silence. The loneliness I'm learning how to handle. I'm beginning to make friends here, I'm doing a better job of keeping up with friends who are farther away, and I'm working on getting a dog. But the silence is more of a problem.

When you live alone, the only sounds are those you create yourself. As an extrovert and an aural learner, I can drown in that kind of silence. Henri Nouwen critiqued our modern society for being unable to handle silence, and he was absolutely right. We have the ability with technology to never be in the silence. Since we can record and play music easily, we have surrounded ourselves with sound. We walk in malls and there's music. We stand in elevators or walk in stairwells and there's music. Stores, restaurants, sporting events, gatherings of friends... there's always background music or sound effects.

I'm not trained to deal with silence. Without any sort of sound to stimulate my brain, I find my mind going in a thousand different directions at once. I'll start out focused on writing and end up cleaning the apartment. Or I'll start meditating and end up mentally creating my to-do list for the next day. Based on my inability to do only one thing at once it has been suggested that I might have ADD. As much as I hate to admit it, that's a plausible explanation.

But if you live alone and want to have white noise, you have to turn on the dishwasher or the dryer or the television. And I'm not very good at turning off the television once it is on. I get sucked into shows that I don't even like, and I'll watch them (while doing other non-productive things like playing on facebook or doing sudoku) for HOURS. I've probably watched more television in the last nine months than I have since junior high. It isn't so bad when I'm working every day and only have a few hours after I get home from a 12-hour day to watch. Then I can justify it as needing to rest my mind after a long work day. However, in the last two weeks when snow and ice storms have cancelled things and left me stuck at home much more than usual, I've wasted entirely too much time in front of the television. I watched eight consecutive episodes of America's Next Top Model, and I don't even like that show.

I want to read more. I want to work out more. I want to watch less TV. But in order to do that, I must learn to deal with the silence. This revelation has come at a good time, I suppose. Lent begins in just over a week, and watching less TV in order to spend more time on reading and genuine self-care will be a good Lenten discipline. I just need to work on embracing the silence. Maybe if I keep reminding myself of all the people who long for silence and can't get it (people who live in Manhattan, people like my sister who have infants that cry at least every three hours, etc.) and take up singing to myself (like my grandmother) this will work out.