Loving the Sound....of Silence

Tonight marks the end of one busy week and the beginning of two more. There is no stopping, it seems. Some of it is my own doing. I just hope it won't be my undoing.

I work. I work all the time. I work early in the morning, until dinner time, and sometimes later. Even though I love my job, it's still work. Really hard work.

I parent. I parent all the time. Last night I hung out with my kids and one of their friends while their dad helped a friend move. It looked like my daughter hadn't seen a washcloth in three days. So I bathed her before I came home.

I try to play. I play when I can. I don't play enough. It's becoming the obsession I don't indulge enough.

I would love to read, but by 10:30 or 11 p.m. when everything else is done, I'm too tired to get very far.

I dream. Oh, how I dream. I dream about driving. I dream about playing my mando and playing the fiddle. I dream about people I used to know. I dream and in the dreams I am working or playing or parenting.

And I wake up tired.

It's time to change my life.

Sometimes it helps to turn the sound off. Over the next week, I'm going to have a little bit of a chance to tune out. My kids and I are getting a change of scenery. The welcome shake up should help some. But the rest will be up to me.

And for that I'm going to need silence. Stillness. Breathing. Me alone. Sitting.

Living requires intention. It requires action. It requires choosing, not just a toss of the runes. It requires stopping periodically to reassess direction. I'm at that point again.

But to do that requires silence. The walk in the woods. The perfect stillness.

It's hard to imagine the world without this song, written by the first award winner of the Gershwin Prize. Paul Simon was regaled the other night for his achievements and contributions to American music as a singer songwriter.

This song is just one of hundreds that illustrate why he won the Gershwin.

This song teaches us to love the silence. Everything we need to hear is in that moment of perfect stillness we all too rarely enjoy.

I'm going to go enjoy that stillness before drifting off to sleep to prepare, in an all too short night, for the banging clangor clamoring of the day in, day out rhythm of my something-slightly-wrong life.