Turning Down the Noise

How to Hear This Week

We spend our lives like drunken sailors. The drive from one place to another, for instance—an hour, two hours, whatever it is. You think of it as a kind of necessary evil that you have to endure in order to get wherever you are going, and you turn on the radio if you are driving, or if you are not driving maybe you take a nap or read the billboards, to “kill time,” as the saying goes. And what a grim saying that is if you stop to think about it, because the time that you are killing, of course, is your own time, and there is precious little of it at that.

Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark

---

If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.

Mark 4:23 ESV

---

Dearest friends,

I hope this finds you well and warm. Our southern town was dusted with snow this week, which I realize may not seem novel to you, depending on where you live. Here in the South, a snowfall causes the world to pause. Schools and businesses close. The roads and highways hush. Most remain warmly huddled at home. As I walked the dog early that morning, accompanied only by the sound of my footsteps and “the sweep/ of easy wind and downy flake,” I noticed our neighborhood fox in the field a few yards away, staring at me.¹ He was quite still, as if the White Witch had arrived with winter and turned him to stone mid-step. It was the first time we had met in the daylight. I more often catch him scampering beneath fences on evening walks at nightfall. “Hello,” I whispered, gently reaching for the phone in my pocket to snap a picture, but the camera-shy fox awakened to life and promptly darted into the trees. As Mary’s life so gently reminds me again, some things are simply to be treasured in one’s heart.²

I have been walking daily without headphones for the last few weeks, practicing to listen. If Elijah experienced God in a still, small voice, perhaps without the noise of other things in my ears, I might, too. I have quickly learned that the silence can be keenly uncomfortable, exposing the ways I “have been fed on noise,” as Anthony Esolen phrases it.³ He describes this noise as mental and spiritual interference, like the crackled reception on the stereos of our old cars. The harmony I long for is sometimes buried beneath interference. Thus, I am doing my part to settle into the discomfort, turning down the noise, listening for the music.

I listened to one young woman this week talk about how she has to watch something on her phone or television while she eats. Why? “Because eating is boring,” she emphasized as if it were common sense. Maybe for the other people listening, it was obvious. I wondered, why are you so avoidant of boredom?

For many years, when my children were young, the word bored was taboo in our home. I always wanted to encourage their agency to do something with their time rather than merely wait for something to be done for them. We are creators, not consumers is one of our family values. Of course, we do consume things, but the idea is to emphasize contribution instead of consumption, agency over passivity. We are made in the image of a Creator, makers and producers by nature. As a homeschool family, the days were often full and busy, but not in the same scheduled manner they would be in a classroom. I set time blocks in our days for the academic work, read-aloud, handwork, and play. Yet they still had much free time and margin for their interests—building with Legos, skateboarding, building forts in the yard, pretend play, reading, climbing trees, sketching, music, and even daydreaming.

I cannot remember the last time I was bored, can you? We have so many ways to divert ourselves, to live on the surface and “kill time.” I may not be drawn to watch television or scroll my phone during a meal, but there are certainly other ways that I fill my time with noisy things in effort to avoid boredom. Unfortunately, it’s often in that negative space of time, that we can truly hear. Although I will continue with my daily walks for this season as planned, here are three ways that I am turning down the noise in other areas of my life this week, in the event you’d like to do the same, too.

Three Ways to Turn Down the Noise This Week