The quiet can be hard. I’m not talking about an absence of noise, but the quiet beneath all the noises that do surround me—swish of the washing machine, thump of a cat jumping down from a counter, the soft sighs of a baby too young to sleep deeply, and then of course her periodic cries: piercing, commanding, flooding the home and my head. The volume increases substantially when our two-year-old is also here. Then there’s the voice of my husband as he talks to the kids or the cats; there’s the whir of cars on the busy road behind our condo. But even despite this stream of sound—running from murmur to chaos, from weepy mess to sunshiney commotion—I’ve been getting this dreadful feeling that it’s mere dressing over something dark and deep, a bright cloth draped over the entrance to a cave.
Of course the baby is a great joy. Also, none of this should be taken as a cry for help. Sometimes I’m even doing much better than okay. And I’m grateful for that. And for this baby. And for her health, and mine, and the messy magic of expanding a family.
And yet I’m unsettled and unnerved. There are obvious reasons why. It’s winter, and I’ve spent way too much time indoors for the last six weeks. I’ve been hospitalized three times in that period—first for the birth, then for the hemorrhage, and then for more hemorrhage-related complications. My time lacks an external structure because I’m not teaching this term (which is, of course, also a blessing). Perhaps most significantly, I do not have a clearly defined project ahead of me. The novel I spent all those years writing and re-writing is more or less done, and whatever does or doesn’t happen next with it is out of my hands. What I do have on my hands are a hundred mundane chores, the near-constant company of a very small, very dear, and very needy human, and a weird sameness to my days that makes it hard to know what day it actually is.
It is, as I said, very quiet. Disconcertingly so.
The mystics say that quiet is part of the path toward truth, or at least peace. Here’s St. John of the Cross: “It is best to learn to silence the faculties and to cause them to be still so that God may speak.” And Meister Eckhart: “The most powerful prayer, one well nigh omnipotent, and the worthiest work of all is the outcome of a quiet mind.” Or how about Thomas Merton: “In silence God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.” How much I want them to be right. In the past I’ve even found comfort in quiet and stillness. Now, though, the quiet is not resolving. Not, anyway, into what I want it to resolve into—something pure, simple, and trusting. Something that feels better than how it feels now.
The truly annoying thing about consciously attempting to live anything that could be called a life of “faith” is that many have gone before me, many have left words and examples and stories behind, many have already tested the kind of difficulty I am facing and have generously shared their solutions. This leaves us—okay, me, at least—in a situation where I “know” the “answer” to my dilemma. I can practically hear people offering me these solutions. Some of this advice is about my attitude: Wait, be patient, trust. Some of it might be practical: Set aside twenty minutes a day to center yourself, take a walk, check in with your friends, read this book. (Some of it might be thinly veiled criticism at my lack of gratitude for all the richness my life does have.)
I have been this advice-giver at times. You could probably make a good argument that this entire essay series is my own soap box on which to stand so I can deliver faith and life-related advice and solutions to you. But the truth is that what we know and how we live are not all that intertwined. This is one of the most confounding and—well, I guess I want to say beautiful things about having a life. We do not actually manage our lives with what we know. Or maybe we do, for an hour or a year at a time. But more often than not our lives act like unbroken horses—we’re just hanging on for, well, dear life. And if we’re going to make it (whatever that means!) we have to do more than have someone tell us how to ride this thing out. We have to live our way through our present difficulty with all the fear and trembling and wisps of hope that come with trying what has never been tried before. Because in a way these answers and solutions—about how to live truly, how to love, how to be with an uncanny and uncomfortable quiet—never have been tried before. Not for this moment in my life, and not for yours either.
Will they hold? If I insist that they will—that all this handed-down wisdom contains everything I need—then my attempts to live by them will be halfhearted, and paradoxically, I’ll never actually experience them as true. If, however, I’m afraid that maybe they won’t, that all of these teachings may or may not offer what I need—well, then I’m out on a limb, out here wondering whether I can trust this quiet, whether it is a grace or a curse.
But of course, out on a limb is what a life of faith requires me to be.
Carol forwarded your post to me and I very much enjoyed reading it. I like your thoughts on not finding the prescribed answers helpful. Often it seem, we have to live it ourselves to find, not the answer, but at least the path of our own journeys.
So beautiful, Mindy. You've captured one of the strongest moods of those early parenting years. It's so hard to remember sometimes that this stage of life will go by in a flash-- even though you want so badly at the time to be on the other side of it. Your writing is so lovely! I look forward to every new post.