After countless nights unable to fall asleep, my exasperation amplified by the guy in my staircase who is routinely fond of playing his guitar and singing at 2am on a Tuesday, I have come to realise the unwavering importance of silence.
From a practical perspective, my morning routine is significantly shortened by taking it on as a silent endeavour. Brushing my teeth, washing my face, getting dressed, packing my bag – all is done in silence. Acting like this has compressed what was a 50-minute rush from my bed to the porter’s lodge into a leisurely 35-minute workflow. As someone with almost daily 9ams, you’d be surprised at the effect it has on my mornings.
I say this as I have recently picked up the unforgiving habit of supplementing every mindless activity with music. Am I taking the three-metre walk to my flat’s kitchen to fill up my water bottle for the evening in silence? Absolutely not. Instead, I queue three of my obsessively listened-to songs, scramble to source my headphones, and make this task an immersive, music-filled experience. And yet as I reach the end of the first song, I find said task is already over. My queue has gone to waste, as has the time I spent curating it.
Perhaps I’m overanalysing, but I wonder whether this need to complement every menial task with music is a way to convince myself that every minute of my time is being used in a worthwhile manner. No second wasted. No moment unproductive. By listening to music, I overcome this feeling of passivity, this potential waste. While living through compressed eight-week terms, which form part of a brief three or four-year undergraduate degree (apologies to my Medics), every second feels precious. And for me, music seems to satisfy the criteria of precious, well-spent time.
Exacerbating this need to fill every second is the inability to be left alone with your own thoughts. With a backing track guiding you through the day, your thoughts feel less daunting, less isolating, and — excuse the language — less ‘deep’. In an environment where you have constant access to media to soothe or entertain you, being honest with yourself without distraction has become less of a given and more of a skill. I certainly have not gained that skill just yet.
There is always the frustrating practicality of painstakingly waiting for Bluetooth to perform its distant, convoluted magic and connect to your beloved headphones, especially when you’re in a rush. However, beyond that, I believe that actively exercising this skill of silence can be powerful in itself.
Other than speeding up a morning routine, silence offers some time for processing. Our brains are incessantly stimulated, visually and audibly, in a way they have not evolved to be able to handle appropriately just yet. This high-volume, relentless influx of information is still unfamiliar and excessive for them. I wonder whether this will change in generations to come, for whom access and exposure to screens (seemingly from birth) may advance the maturation of the brain to handle an online dopamine-dependent environment with greater ease.
But regardless of the future, I expect that most of us right now would agree we are quietly overwhelmed. I (perhaps naively) believe that implementing an intentional period of silence in your daily routine can help your brain and body overcome this. Silence doesn’t have to be jarring. Maybe the significant discomfort that silence gives us illustrates that it must have some worth. For me, challenging myself to practice this has taken the form of washing our flat’s dishes in silence. Without lyrics and melodies competing for my attention, I begin to focus that attention to the task at hand, enforcing stringency and precision in the scrubbing of oil-soaked pans, and most importantly, letting my mind breathe a sigh of relief.