Solitude and silence -- Saturday night

Here I am, studying 'Solitude and silence', alone on Saturday night. The irony does not escape me. As an introvert, I like being alone, and find it comfortable and normal. But somehow, on Saturday night, I'm peculiarly aware of solitude. But it's not a bad thing to explicitly make this choice.

As far as silence goes, I may have trouble quieting my own mind, as I wrote on Thursday, but I prefer quiet surroundings, most of the time. In fact, I sometimes actually walk out of stores or restaurants, because the background music irritates me, and interferes with my thoughts. I was frustrated and annoyed in the gym this week, because I was intending on using my 25 minutes on the eliptical machine to review my scripture memorization, but the noise pollution was amazing. There was one TV to my right, another (tuned to another station) to my left, and a third one more distantly at the other end of the room. Then there was some sound spilling out of the adjoining room holding the step class, and the icing on the cake was the piped in radio station. Help!!! It makes me really stressed out, but other people seem energized by it.

Unfortunately, I suspect that my innate need for quiet actually puts me behind rather than ahead, in the discipline of solitude and silence. Why do I say this? Because I'm distracted by noises that don't seem to bother anyone else. For instance, right now, in addition to the traffic noises out the window, I'm hearing the hard drive of my computer spinning, a jet overhead, and two different insects (I think they are cicadas, but I could be confusing them with something else). Oh, now that I'm specifically listening, I think there are three of them, not just two. I'm feeling tremendously fortunate that I have quiet neighbors. While I can sometimes hear TVs or voices or footsteps, I'm so grateful that no one is really noisy. And tonight, the cicadas (or whatever they are) sound really nice. I get a kick out of hearing natural sounds in the middle of the suburbs.

This afternoon, I went with my friends to the Mill Neck Manor apple festival. It is a fundraiser for the school for the deaf. It was a perfect fall day -- sunny and crisp. I was enjoying the whole experience: being with friends; eating the terrific roasted corn; selecting a box of apples to take home. And then it occurred to me that one of the things I was enjoying was the relative quiet -- so many people were signing instead of talking that there was simply less ambient noise than you would expect from a crowd that size. And I suddenly wondered what it would be like to not have that constant auditory input bombarding you all day long.

So anyway, when I finally find a quiet place to come before the Lord, then I become aware of the clutter in my own thoughts. I feel like the woman in the movie 'The gods must be crazy', in the cafeteria scene in the beginning, who politely asks: "Is the noise inside my head bothering you?"

P.s. That was a joke, in case you couldn't tell. But I do love the movie, and I think it's a great line.