Silence

“White, a blank page or canvas.  The challenge:  Bring order to the whole, through design, composition, balance, light and harmony.”

Thus state the opening lines of Stephen Sondheim’s fabulous musical “Sunday in the Park With George”, where the artist struggles to fill the canvas of his latest painting.

And thus have been my thoughts these past few weeks as I’ve written, researched, adjusted and restarted a ramble or two – or three.

I don’t have writer’s block.  My Rambles file on my desktop attests to the number of ideas floating around my head.  Instead, I’m overwhelmed by the importance of silence.

It could be that I’ve come to the end of another school year.  The chaos of the job has subsided and the overwhelming “teacher tired” has set in.  I’ve thought numerous times in the past few months that if I had a dollar for every time I’d heard my name in the course of a day I could have retired several years ago.  And I’m not even an official teacher.

But I think it’s more than that.  For several months now I’ve been thinking of the differences between my lovely mum’s mornings and mine.  And the thing I keep coming back to is the quiet.

We grew up in a rural area.  I could count on the fingers of one hand how many cars drove past our house in a day, and we could hear no rumble of distant traffic. 

We had no radio or television in our bedrooms. Smart phones and the internet had not yet been invented. We went to sleep to the quiet tick of the bedside clock and woke to the dawn choruses of the birds outside the window.

Mum was selective in what she listened to on the radio and the device remained permanently in the kitchen.  Despite her love of classical music, she played her records sparingly.  She loved to hang the washing accompanied only by the songs of the birds.

And she read.  A lot.  It is an interest she handed down to all her children, and she’d be thrilled to know it has extended to all her grandchildren.  Her home library is slowly being depleted as we each take her books to add to our own growing collections. And libraries are known for being – quiet.

If I have any new year’s resolution, it is to include more silence in my days.  To that end I hope to find an old fashioned bedside clock to replace my phone’s alarm; preferably one that is not battery operated and whose tick is not louder than its tock.  I hope to cease using my phone throughout the day like it’s a 1970s transistor radio.  And I hope to decrease the number of books on my “To Be Read” list.  Mum would be pleased, I think, although the list is instead ever growing.

Whilst Georges Seurat, the artist depicted in Sondheim’s show, needed to fill his canvas, let’s take these next few weeks of the festive season to not fill ours.  Let’s restore our minds from all we’ve consumed this year and enjoy the serenity of silence when we can.

Nikki