Outer Quiet
I don’t feel fully dressed until I have a generous wad of wax earplugs tucked into my bra.
The world has access to me through my hearing and I find it impossible to tune out overly loud coffee shop music, yapping voices or echo-y acoustics. Ear plugs help drown out the auditory dross, enabling me to focus on reading or writing or conversation with a friend (yes, I have been known to wear ear plugs in acoustically challenging restaurants so that I can better hear my companions). Ear plugs are one tactic I use to mitigate interruption in my non-retreat, living-waking life.
For 10 years I lived at a busy intersection in San Francisco in a 6-unit Victorian apartment building with its original, single-pane, wavey-glass sash windows. The unrelenting noisescape of city living, despite my enthusiasm for giant wax ear plugs, was punishing to my general sense of serenity as well as my sleep life.
At the intersection of Duboce and Guerrero, daytime hours were a symphony of crescendoing and decrescendoing loud pipes saving lives at the traffic light in front of our house. The midnight playlist featured cars idling at the KFC drive-through, blasting music through bass woofers that shook every window within a block radius.
In tandem with the whimsies of traffic, my neighbors contributed generously to the constellation of
erratic
sonic
disruption.
The neighbor who lived opposite our flat would blast big band music at 3 am, evoking shouts from the inhabitants of other buildings on our block to TURN THAT SHIT OFF. A dear friend who lived upstairs was losing his hearing and regularly fell asleep on the volume button of his TV remote control. (Somehow, his body weight never landed on the down arrow.) And over one five-month period, the flat below ours became a robust crossroads for drug commerce. Daily and unfailingly, 4:30 am and 4:30 pm were punctuated by one gentleman repeating an incantation for 15-20 minutes:
“Know what I’m saying? Know what I mean? Know what I’m saying? Know what I mean? Know what I’m saying? Know what I mean?...”
All in all, a cacophonic shit sandwich. It was during this acoustically overstimulated period of my life that I started pursuing deliberate solitude.
In the course of my professional activities, I stumbled across a framework* that helped me to understand why I am so derailed and interrupted by noise. Ultimately, this understanding led to greater clarity about what I need in a retreat setting to meet my needs for solitude.
One aspect of my career includes facilitating group conversations for philanthropic institutions. In service of supporting that work, I have pursued in-depth training and performed independent research into effective group process and convergent facilitation. Quite accidentally I stumbled across Collaborative Intelligence, a book that describes how groups can leverage their intellectual diversity as a path to innovation and transformation.
The authors begin the book by delivering a Mind Pattern model for how people learn differently:
Based on 45 years of… research, Dr. Dawna Markova has identified six unique patterns that our minds use to process information, each with its own way of learning and communicating. These patterns reflect the sequence we take in and express visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (physical) information. These patterns are not related to personality or gender; they focus solely on the way we perceive and convey information.
It’s not uncommon to hear people say, “I’m a visual learner,” but, in the book, the authors break down more surgically how seeing, hearing and movement engage us with one of three attentional states in the brain.
In modern popular non-fiction, our capacity for focused attention is privileged above other attentional states, typically because this state serves the Gods of Productivity. Collaborative Intelligence lists focused attention as one of three primary waking states in the brain; the other two being a sorting state and an open attention / de-focused state.
How does this work? An example might be that an athlete may engage in
focused attention through kinesthetic activity (movement and practice),
sorting attention through auditory stimuli (words of feedback from a coach), and
open attention through visual inputs (watching recordings of practices).
Responding to the authors’ self-assessments, I discovered that I am an auditory focuser, a visual sorter and a kinesthetic creative (open attention holder). This means that noise grabs my attention, paper and pen help me to sort my thoughts, and hiking and working out are good for my creative synapses. This translates into a retreat formula where nature + journal + hiking = bliss.
Linking this result to my auditory vulnerability for agitation and derailment was revelatory. It helped me to articulate why quiet is such an integral part of solitude for me.
The senses which claim my attention are likely different than the senses that claim yours. Creating a retreat setting that eliminates (or at least mitigates) the land grab for your attention will pave the way for that holy grail of inner quiet.
*Please hold the framework lightly—I find it helpful as a guide to supplement my retreat goals. The online quiz is a watered-down version of what they present in the book, but my results are the same with either tool.
