Noise, Silence, and the Space Between
Cultivating habits of silence can help us find a less distracted, more abundant life.
Review by Christopher Kuo
The last thing that Erling Kagge did before starting his journey across Antarctica was to toss the batteries for his radio in the rubbish bin of the departing plane. Kagge is a Norwegian explorer and the first person ever to complete the “Three Poles Challenge,” which requires trekking across the North and South Poles and summiting Mt. Everest, the “Third Pole.” He is also the first person to reach the South Pole alone—an experience that revealed to him the wonder and beauty of silence.
“Alone on the ice, far into that great white nothingness, I could both hear and feel the silence,” Kagge writes in Silence: In the Age of Noise, a collection of essays in which he reminds us of the transformative power of quietness: its ability to help us reflect, wonder, truly notice, and give thanks.
We urgently need his reminder. Noise saturates our lives. It pings from our smartphones, chimes in our inboxes, blares from the television, hisses from the coffeemaker, bubbles up from our coworkers and family. From morning to night, we swim in a sea of noise.
The rise of new technologies has only exacerbated the presence of sound in our lives. We almost always have our smartphones with us, meaning there is no time or space where noise cannot intrude. Even our bedrooms can be equipped with Alexa or Google Home, turning oases of silence into nodes in our aggressively interconnected world. We may try to escape to nature, but noise follows us there as well, in the steady drone of cars or the rumble of airplanes overhead. There are fewer and fewer places where one can find complete silence.
In light of this, there’s a growing recognition of the dangers of noise pollution. One 2011 report by the World Health Organization found that noise pollution could lead to higher blood pressure and fatal heart attacks. Other studies show that noise pollution can inhibit learning and development, especially among children.
But noise does more than inhibit our learning or harm our physiology. At a more fundamental level, noise can rob us of purposeful, meaningful lives. It’s difficult to confront the big questions of a virtuous life—why we are here, who we are, and what it means to be human—when we are surrounded by noise. Noise, after all, is often a form of distraction. In this sense, noise may be one symptom of a more deep-rooted issue: our drive to be constantly doing things in order to avoid pausing to ask ourselves why. We are hurried creatures, constantly on the move. We are afraid to slow down, turn off our technology, and breathe for a moment, because we are unsure of what we might find. Beneath all the noise, we might discover ourselves—and that terrifies us. As seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal put it, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Kagge describes a study from Harvard and the University of Virginia where researchers put participants alone in a room for six to fifteen minutes. They gave the individuals the option to administer a painful shock to themselves to reduce their time in silence. Nearly half of the participants chose this option.
We fear silence. And yet, if we want to be fully human—if we want to rightly inhabit this strange and wondrous world—we must learn to be quiet. Silence can save our world.
Big ideas need time, space, and silence to germinate. They require attention and concentration—two qualities often sacrificed on the altar of noise.
If noise undermines our ability to think and to truly live, then silence is our recourse to an abundant life. Silence allows us to be alone with our thoughts, our fears and our doubts. It enables us to slow down from the hectic pace of life and to contemplate the transcendent. It gives us space to breathe.
Silence is a source of self-awareness and creativity, while noise is the enemy of contemplation. When we are relentlessly distracted, we lose opportunities to examine ourselves: Why do I do what I do? How did I come here? Where am I headed? What or whom do I truly care about?
We also need silence for the intellectual life. Big ideas need time, space, and silence to germinate. They require attention and concentration—two qualities often sacrificed on the altar of noise. As Lane Wallace wrote in The Atlantic, “Just try to imagine Henry David Thoreau writing his masterpiece about Walden Pond while twittering, texting, and watching CNN.”
Just as noise can have harmful effects on our physical bodies, silence can do the opposite. Research has shown that exposure to silence can help reduce stress, and one study found that mice that were exposed to silence exhibited growth of new brain cells in the hippocampus.
Religious groups have long recognized the importance of silence to the human soul. In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis writes from the perspective of an elder demon instructing a younger one. He describes the role that noise plays in our world:
Music and silence—how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since Our Father [Satan] entered Hell… no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise—Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile—Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end.
Screwtape recognized the spiritual power posed by silence. When we eliminate noise, we find time and space to hear God’s voice.
In 1 Kings 19, God tells Elijah to go out on a mountainside to prepare to meet the Lord. “A great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind.” An earthquake came next, then a raging fire, but the Lord was not in either. Finally, Elijah heard a gentle voice—the whisper of God. How are we to hear this divine whisper when we are always listening to something else? We must “be still” before we can know that He is God (Ps. 46:10).
But silence does more than point us to the divine; it also re-orients us to the world around us. Silence is not escapism. Instead, Kagge writes, embracing silence is about “seeing the world a bit more clearly.” As he trudged across the ice, Kagge began to notice unexpected things: the varying shapes of the ice, the blue tint of the snow, the constantly shifting wind. “The landscape seemed to be changing along the route; but I was wrong,” he wrote. “My surroundings remained constant; I was the one who changed … Nature spoke to me in the guise of silence. The quieter I became, the more I heard.” Silence taught him to notice.
About two years ago, I spent a full day of silence during a camping trip with friends in the Adirondacks. After canoeing across a lake to a spot in the woods, we decided that the next day none of us would speak to each other until dark. I spent most of the day at the lakeside, watching the water lap at the rocks, staring up at the gray sky. We broke our silence over a warm fire and tacos. At the time, I didn’t think anything miraculous had happened. I hadn’t seen a sign in the sky or heard a booming voice from God. Still, to this day, I remember the caress of the rain on my face, the damp smell of pine needles, and the sound of water lapping against the rocks. I remember an abiding sense of peace, a wonder at the beauty of the world around me. And that, too, is a miracle.
Since not all of us have the luxury of time or money to escape for weeks to secluded landscapes, we must find silence in the nooks and crannies of everyday life: an accumulation of small, still moments that creates an atmosphere of quietness.
The coronavirus pandemic has been a gigantic semicolon. It has put a pause on many of life’s everyday activities, from office work to cocktail parties. It has caused the world to go quiet in a way that hasn’t happened in decades. One New York Times writer called this season the “silent spring.” Reporters throughout the world have documented how the coronavirus has caused empty streets, shuttered stores, and hushed cities. An eerie quiet has descended on our world.
On the one hand, the disruption of the pandemic has given us an opportunity to re-examine our lifestyles. Stripped of our normal routines, we have the chance to experiment with new rhythms of silence.
At the same time, this pandemic has been anything but peaceful. Many of us are cloistered in homes that are rarely quiet. My home is a case in point: I live with my family of five, along with my grandparents and the home help aides who care for them, meaning there are at least eight people in the house at all times.
More fundamentally, we can’t all leave for the South Pole or take months off to hike Mt. Everest—not during normal times and especially not during a pandemic. Silence often seems like a luxury, the property of those who have the money and time to lavish on month-long wilderness expeditions. Though silence is crucial to our wellbeing, we are tasked with finding more feasible ways to experience it.
William Cronon addresses this dilemma in The Trouble with Wilderness. Responding to the false dichotomy in which “wilderness” is separated from everyday life, Cronon argues that wilderness doesn’t have to be found in some pristine landscape. We can and should look for wilderness in the mundane: “in the seemingly tame fields and woodlots of Massachusetts, in the cracks of a Manhattan sidewalk, even in the cells of our own bodies.”
The same could be said about silence. Since not all of us have the luxury of time or money to escape for weeks to secluded landscapes, we must find silence in the nooks and crannies of everyday life: an accumulation of small, still moments that creates an atmosphere of quietness. “You cannot wait for silence,” Kagge advises. “You have to find your own South Pole.”
So, how do we truly experience silence in our everyday lives, in those mundane moments where the baby is crying, the phone is ringing, and the spouse is shouting your name?
We start by controlling and eliminating what we can. Kagge calls this a form of “subtraction.” Subtraction requires the virtue of self-control, the ability to say “no” to the noise in our lives. This isn’t easy, especially since we are often addicted to noise. Kagge describes the dopamine loop that occurs because of our phone notifications. “The more we are inundated, the more we wish to be distracted…. We don’t know if we have received an email, message or other form of communication so we check and recheck our phones like a one-armed bandit in an attempt to achieve satisfaction.”
Breaking out of this habit requires more than just saying “no” in the moment to instant gratification. This expression of self-control is what social scientists call “effortful inhibition,” what we often think of as brute willpower. But researchers have shown that effortful inhibition can actually backfire: “suppressing an unwanted impulse can, ironically, make it more likely to influence behavior.” The ability to practice effortful inhibition can also decrease with tiredness or stress.
Instead, Angela Duckworth and Brian Galla from the University of Pennsylvania argue that there’s a component to self-control beyond effortful inhibition. This component is habit formation. Habits are powerful because they are automatic. Once someone has a habit in place, they don’t have to consciously think about saying “no” to a harmful behavior. Their effortful inhibition is actually reduced. Duckworth and Galla’s conclusion was that self-controlled people achieve their long-term goals in large part because of the cultivation of habits.
Let’s apply this logic to the pursuit of silence in our daily lives. Given the addictive nature of technology, we may struggle to stop checking notifications in the moment. We may find ourselves sinking back into the sea of noise. Instead, we can work to cultivate everyday liturgies of silence. Liturgies, according to James K. A. Smith, are “habit-forming, love-shaping rituals that get hold of our hearts and aim our loves.”
We shouldn’t evade the demands of family and home, but we can carve out times to silence our phones, log off Twitter or stop scrolling through Instagram. We can wake up earlier than usual, before the demands of the day press upon us. We can speak less than we normally would, or think longer before each word. In my own cultivation of silence, I’ve committed to reading Scripture before powering on my phone, not checking email before 11 a.m., and turning off technology an hour before I go to bed.
Find what works for you. In my own life, these practices have been life-giving. Instead of pulling me away from the world, they have oriented my heart more fully to the people and God who I love.
Take a chance today. Turn off your phone for an hour, or hit the “Do Not Disturb” button for the day. Be bold in creating new habits. Carve out time for stillness. Silence—and the abundant life—awaits.
Christopher Kuo is a student at Duke University majoring in English and Political Science and completing a certificate in Policy Journalism and Media Studies. He is features managing editor of Duke’s student newspaper and editor-in-chief of Duke Crux, a journal of Christian thought. He will be working as a Metro intern at the Los Angeles Times this summer. Twitter: @chriskuo17.
This piece was written as part of the Veritas Institute, a program of the Veritas Forum at which college students spend a week learning from top scholars in the fields of science and technology and write an essay about a topic at the intersection of science and the big questions. Fare Forward is pleased to support the Veritas Institute by publishing some of the best submitted pieces.
