The power of silence
Creativity is an important part of life, and silence is an important part of the creative process. The internet tells us that if we shut out the outside world and focus on our craft, we will experience are best creative work. But how? What would you need to change if you wanted to experience more silence and more creativity in your life?
In 2007, I moved to Fort Albany, a remote fly-in reserve in Northern Ontario. I moved there for my first teaching job, with my 3 young children. Looking back, I am amazed by my own bravery, but sometimes life’s circumstances push us past our comfortable limits whether we like it our not.
Anyways, I digress! The silence. I arrived in Fort Albany in early January, it was a frozen world like I had never experienced, but the most jolting thing was not the extreme cold or the volume of snow, it was the silence. I had been living in Guelph, Ontario before the move, a city with a population of about 100,000. Not a big city, but the noise was always there. Not that I was really aware of it, until it wasn’t there. The first week in this subarctic world, my ears rang. They truly rang, day and night, from the silence! Louder at night, when there wasn’t even a sound. The silence was so profound, it actually made me uncomfortable. With it being a fly-in reserve, there were few vehicles, people walked, it was a small reserve, population 800. A snowmobile broke the silence every now and then.
Once I was used to the silence, I embraced it as something profound, it gave me a new calmness, life slowed down somehow in the silence. I didn’t really know what silence was up until this point. This type of silence leaves so much space in your mind. Space to think, not think, dream, daydream, meditate. The absence of every decibel of background noise helped me reconnect with myself and my thoughts and provided a huge boost to my ability to produce, and create.
Today, I rarely - if ever - get extended moments of uninterrupted silence.
The miniature computer (a.k.a. phone) we carry around keeps us tethered to a steady stream of sound bites. We are always focused on (or distracted by) information input. In this mode our brain is not able to produce meaningful output. Research tells us that an idle or wandering mind, is actually one of the traits we need to create high quality output. whisperroom.com
For most of us, including me, the type of silence that I was able to experience in the remote north, is unattainable.
Somehow we need to find periodic silence. The capital 'S' kind of Silence!
The challenge: how to disconnect completely.
The goal: Spend five minutes, in complete silence
Get your phone out of your space for five minutes
Turn off everything.
Invest in noise cancelling headphones if you need to
Forget your to-do list.
Once in zen mode, allow yourself a solid five minutes of concentration. Afterwards you can record any big revelations you had, if you need to. Each time you do this, stay in the zen zone a little longer. Work your way up to at least twenty minutes in silence.
The payoff, you will be capable of far more creativity than you ever imagined.
To silence and creativity!