Be Silent

In July of 1845, Henry David Thoreau left for his sanctuary, a solitary cabin he’d himself newly built, a mile away from any other house or neighbors. It was near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. It was a small 10 x 15 feet hut on land lent to him by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a longtime neighbor and mentor. There he would stay alone for the next two years, living, reading, refining his ideas, and writing.

To Thoreau, this was an experiment. He framed his journey there not as an unfounded love for seclusion, but as a test for practicality—to see on the one hand, the feasibility of his living on very minimal resources (he spent only $62 in the first eight months), and more transcendentally to work for just one day of the week, resting for the rest. This’d set the perfect backdrop for his writing and his interaction with nature,

“to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Life at the cabin was a quiet one. His residence, far away from any other, ensured the silence of true solitude. Except on occasional cases when he’d have curious wanderers or men stray by, Walden Pond was all to himself. It was just the hoots of the owl, or the laughs of the loon, or the bullfrog’s trumpet, or at other times, the thudding of his own hoe as he worked the farm.

Then there was the contemplation. Glorious contemplation.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time...

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

The silence and quiet afforded him both the time and space to think, to reflect, to appreciate and observe the fauna and flora of the woods, an experience which eventually influenced his naturalistic views and essays of later years. He read the classics like Homer and the Bhagavad Gita. He practiced contemplation and meditation. He’d awake and have morning baths in the pond, a ritual he described as a “religious exercise.” This solitude and the calm repose it offered provided him the perfect opportunity to go on walks—long 3-4-hour walks—to document and bask in nature’s phenomena.

Then he wrote.

Much of Thoreau’s Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers would be written in his time there at the cabin. He spoke of a certain “undisturbed solitude and stillness” which enabled him to be “rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs, while the birds sing around or flitted noiselessly through the house.” Walden began as a collection of journal entries about his experience there, and as a response to the townsfolk’s curiosity about his mode of life considering his reclusive setup in the woods. Such was the peace and clarity this retreat offered which he so clearly articulated in an entry that “You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.”

Isn’t that such inspiring stillness and deepness?

To be by ourselves, “without assistance, without diversion... in silence”—as the narrator in Lancelot put it—that nature gradually, one form at a time, reveals itself! To be able to tune out the noises of the world completely to notice fully the pulse of life itself, the little things around us. To sit “by ourselves” without words or thoughts, that without effort, the “a-ha” moments come to us. To be completely attuned to our surroundings that in that moment, we are completely free. And how many insights could we uncover by coming close to this level of stillness, for what we do?

That is silence.

Silence that lets us “really” start hearing.

Blaise Pascal noted that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit in a room, alone.” He was right. Thomas Carlyle would have his own say that “Thought will not work except in silence.” If we really do hope to uncover secrets and find solutions to the obstacles we face, we have to cultivate the art of silence and calm repose. That is, if our lives and work are important to us.

A friend of the popular TV host Fred Rogers found himself a long time ago now with some struggles. Mr. Rogers wrote to him.

He wrote a few words - words that are key to help him—and us—manage the situations and circumstances life so often throws at us. The words are as simple as they are important:

Just be quiet and think.

It’ll make all the difference in the world.

This is where we will focus our attention.

We will be quiet.

We will listen.