If you could hear the whispering of the dream, you would hear no other sound. - Kahlil Gibran
“Mama, there’s no sound.” My daughter and I were eating dinner when she made this observation in an amazed whisper. The peace had been achieved at a price. Fifteen minutes earlier, I’d exiled my son to his room after a meltdown involving Power Rangers and green beans. The lack of wailing from above indicated that he’d fallen asleep. Sitting there with my hands still clenched in tight frustration, however, I hadn’t noticed. When Tobey is unhappy, he can scream and pout with the best NBA player. When he’s happily entranced in play, he makes almost as much noise, spitting and spewing the hiss of a rocket, the roar of a dragon, the squeal of a race car.
Bella was right—the hush was remarkable. Given how much I crave quiet, I should have noticed it sooner. I’m convinced that my writing, and thus my life, would be greatly improved if I had just one completely peaceful hour each day. I feel the same way about clean floors. But I’ve learned to live with dog hair and dust balls, just as I’ve learned to live with a certain amount of acoustic clutter.
Noise was one of my biggest concerns when deciding whether to have children. Their high-pitched voices, which seem to follow no predictable pattern—a yelp or a yowl can come at any moment—made me anxious. I told my husband that he and our future children could have the house; the dog and I would retreat to a mountainside monastery. “We’ll visit often,” I promised.
Of course, I’ve discovered that it’s easier to tolerate the staccato of one’s own children. But no matter how used to the cacophony of childhood one becomes, it’s still exhausting and antithetical to the kind of focus that creative work demands.
It makes sense to define silence as a negative state, as a lack of noise, which is how the hush of our house struck Bella. But that would be like discounting cellular activity just because we can’t see it. Consider a painter serenely at her easel or a mathematician in concentration at her computer. In both tableaus, there is analysis and critical thinking occurring: where to place the next line, which symbol comes next. But there’s also reverie and meditation. In order to create, we need space (silence and space often become synonymous in the harried mother’s vocabulary) for our minds to wander, stretch, and stumble over variations of phrases and images that can’t occur when we quickly and efficiently scoop up the first “answer” that comes to mind.
My friend Tilly Woodward, a painter, says that when she is working background noise falls away.
