Quietness

On finding your center even when things don't stop

As the summer still refuses to leave room for the fall, it feels almost a necessity to take advantage of the pleasant (it still a bit too warm) afternoons for long walks, iced mate tea in the afternoon, bottles of rosé and white wine.

On one of these late-summer afternoons, I met with a friend for a chat, some bites, and a drink in a bar that grew progressively busy as the hours passed by, as if everyone had had the same impulse to enjoy the nice afternoon even if it was a Monday. As we sat at a counter facing the street and sipped frozen piña coladas, my friend pointed out that, on the building across the street from us, a man was reading on the fire escape. The whole thing was a sight to behold: the cars and buses going by, the brick wall, the iron staircase, and this older man, sitting comfortably, with what looked like a couple of pillows, a drink, and something engaging enough to make him virtually still. I joked saying he must have a spine of steel or the best staircase pillow in the world, because if you’ve sat with your back resting against the edge of a step at any point in your life you know it is far from being the most comfortable position. Yet there he was. Just reading, seemingly oblivious to the late afternoon traffic below or the people in the bar who could easily spot him like we had.

Our conversation continued, going back to where we were before we spotted the fire-escape reader. But I would be lying if I said I didn’t steal another glance or two, dreaming about finding myself a reading spot like that. Thinking back to it, it was less about the reading and more about what looked like finding calmness in the middle of a busy afternoon, tuning out the world outside enough at least to enjoy the fresh breeze and dedicate some time to the pages before his eyes.

Sometimes, it’s about finding quietness rather than finding silence, I have learned.

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One of the lessons I am trying to internalize from yoga practice is to make myself available to listen. Not to the chaotic traffic that often plagues our street, with double-parked cars in a single-lane way. But to pay attention to the sounds of steps, of breathing in and out, of fingers on a keyboard, and keys on the lock. To find stillness in the middle of a whirlwind, not always easy in a big city, not when the world keeps telling you to pay attention to…to what? To itself, but mostly to the distractions it throws at you. Sitting with the sounds around you, allowing the soundscape to unfold and reveal itself, one perception at a time, is a luxury. It is stealing time from something else. But what isn’t stealing time these days?

I think back to the man on the fire escape, sipping some beverage I could not identify from a distance, and I have to wonder whether the setting helped him find stillness or if finding stillness happened despite the setting. I feel like, most of the time, I pretend that quietness and stillness are hard to achieve because life outside is too busy, too noisy, too chaotic. But I have always been a little too loud, a little too expansive, a little too energetic. The truth is, I struggle with the idea of sitting with my own quietness because I see it as something I have to fight for, against the noises in my head and outside it, against my fidgety nature, against boredom.

Can stillness of mind be found in a walk? Sometimes, it’s easier to let the legs do the thinking and the processing, to leave the mind to wander around the trees and the clouds and the breathing.

One late afternoon in the park, I sat down, softened my gaze, and just paid attention to the sounds around me for several seconds, feeling the cool breeze cut through the heat of the sun on my skin. When I opened my eyes, before grabbing my book, I noted down the sounds I heard during that brief moment.

Pickleball paddles. Skate wheels hitting the concrete. A dog barking to the left. Slow and heavy traffic. A helicopter on its way north. Precocious fallen leaves softly crunching under someone’s feet.

Individual noises, fragments of conversation and of music, signs of lives close and not-so-close that were moving, coming closer, growing distant. Listening is not my forte. I like noise. Ideally of the vague, generic type, like the one you get at a coffee shop that is the right kind of busy. More of a woosh than a full-on boom. But picking each of the sounds around me apart, placing them in space even without seeing their source, listening over hearing… That takes a little bit of work. A conscious effort towards perceiving rather than simply acknowledging.

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It feels serendipitous that the trailer for Small Things Like These has come out just on the day when these thoughts have come to mind. In the movie, Cillian Murphy plays Bill, a coal merchant in a small Irish town whose local convent doubles as a Magdalene laundry (a seemingly pious endeavor that functioned as closed-off workhouses for "fallen women"—prostitutes, single mothers, and any other disreputable or unsupported poor women). I am not an old-time fan of Claire Keegan’s work, but I have just recently read the novel(la?) and have recurrently thought about it since. About its brutal quietness that tiptoes the line of cold silence. About how suffering is more often a woosh than a full-on boom.

But so is happiness. Contentment over jubilation. Realizing this is one of those things I would list under “when I noticed I had grown up.”

In You’ve Got Mail, Meg Ryan’s character Kathleen Kelly expresses her concern about whether she truly likes the type of life she leads or if she does so out of fear. She describes her life as “small…well, valuable, but small.” I never paid much attention to this line until more or less recently. Sure, we all have great dreams and plans, but in this day and age, isn’t valuable an achievement in itself? Small, she believes, is something that needs a qualifier that counter-balances its inherent negativeness. But does it? Kathleen’s character has a certain soothing quality to her: her brightly lit apartment full of books but not unmanageably cluttered, her wardrobe in pastel and neutrals with comfortable knits and sensible low shoes, even her favorite flowers. Daisies, she says, are the friendliest flower. They are because they are small and thus valuable. The epitome of a kind of ever-so-inviting quietness that is hard to come by. But it can be nurtured, just like daisies.

Good conversation over dinner. A walk in the park. A nice cup of tea. Lunch in a favorite spot. An afternoon playing video games. A good book.

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Books to help find quietness in their joy: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (trans. Thomas Teal), The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim, Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym.

Books to help find quietness in their eerie sadness: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel (trans. Bruna Dantas Lobato), Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck (trans. Susan Bernofsky).