Solitude and silence

In The Age of Absurdity, Michael Foley tackles a number of happiness-related subjects: strategies for achieving happiness, relationships in a modern and fast moving world, consumption, perpetual youth, fear and anxiety.  Although these don’t seem to have to do much with happiness at first sight, it is very difficult to define happiness without some recourse to what it is not, or what it relates to.

Last night I wandered through the chapter ‘The Assault on Detachment’, in which Foley talks about how difficult it is to switch off in the modern world: wherever we go, whatever we do, we are simultaneously assaulted by numerous extraneous noises and invasions of our privacy:

 ‘Anyone doing fewer than three things at once is not living to the full, failing to take advantage of the age of simultaneous multiple distractions and permanent multiple connexity – the multitasking, hyperlinked, immersive network world.’

Our blackberries beep, our inboxes chime when new messages pour in, the television is on while we read the newspaper, and we worry about our jobs, travel arrangements, etc whilst we listen to partners, children and try and work out what we will eat tonight.  Foley provides a number of much more interesting examples.   He writes

‘… it is becoming impossible to avoid distraction.  The very concepts of separation and boundaries are becoming obsolete.  Airports, railway stations, office blocks, hotels and hospitals have become mini-cities with large, bright, high-celinged, open-plan areas offering a distracting range of products and services.’

But what about wanting to switch off, to be alone, can we still do that?  I have had so much to do these last three months that when today I find myself behind my computer and realise that I have drafted all the reports I am working on, have carried out all the necessary interviews and that there is not actually another project waiting in the wings to be taken forward immediately, I am at a bit of a loss.  This is what I have dreamt of these last months: not being under pressure to deliver something within the next half hour or  day, or week or month that is actually quite demanding.  Not having boss, clients or potential clients coming back with critique or with further demands.  I sit and don’t quite know how to take it, what to do.  Should I be writing bids, so some client research, pretend that I am busy?  I’ve got to write or do something.  So I write this piece for my blog.

‘The serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss – Solitude, Stillness and Silence – and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise…{and that]… solitude, stillness and silence are death.’ (p.103).

Perhaps it is time to just let stillness and silence in for a bit and not feel too uneasy about doing ‘nothing’.  Soon it will all start again, and if it does not, then perhaps solitude will help to move along some more writing.

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