The rarest gifts

Chapter 140

“Thought will not work except in silence,”  - Thomas Carlyle 

I live in a world of constant partial attention and I can attest to the truth of this statement. I find myself constantly striving for more and more silence in my life, in order to be able to think well. Or think at all most days. The practice of constant partial attention is like dancing on a floor covered with broken glass shards - you cannot not dance nor clean the floor properly, at the same time, and to try and do them at the same time is dangerous.

Quiet in a world that can’t stop talking is the bane of my existence. Silence is the golden place of quiet. It is the palace of productivity and thinking. There are few things more undervalued in the modern world. I personally own three sets of noise-cancelling headphones and earbuds, for I am constantly striving to find more quiet and silence. In fact I am wearing one of these at this very moment.

Intrusions, disturbances inside and outside of us, distractions, sounds not of our own choosing, endless words that have no purpose or meaning, are some of the millions of mind numbing sticks in the spokes of our mental clarity and computations. Thinking is a difficult and fragile enterprise and it is effectively bombarded by almost everything and anything.

Certainly you and I can develop systems and resilience to this bombardment of distraction and sound and attention swerving intrusions which prevent us from doing the hard work of thinking effectively. Since I have largely given up on controlling my environment, it is simply beyond my actual control much of the time, I am constantly working on these systems and resilience- and it often feels like one step forward and three or four steps back.

Far easier and much more effective to keep finding silence and quiet. No amount of focus and discipline will be more effective than those rare gifts.