on silence & Serenity

Living in the present. That’s what I learned most from today… and I think it is a “lesson” we will learn over and over again. 

The past couple of weeks I felt a level of persistent anxiety I hadn’t in a while so I turned to music, as I most often do. I discovered some new music, and built some pretty cool playlists too. 

But I think I realized, just like anything else, I need to enjoy the music more. 

And I need to enjoy the silence. The sounds around me.

When I got home from the suburbs the other night, I was so excited to see my roommate and just chat with her. Then I climbed into bed with the window open, for some fresh air.

I, ironically, was staying up until 11 just to listen to Chelsea Cutler’s new song and Spotify’s New Music Friday.  

I went to close the window and put my Airpods in when the L started to pass. In that moment, I thought about how I had missed that sound during my brief departure from the city. I thought, “Wow, I never really realized how lucky I am to hear it.” 

How lucky I am to live in a city where noises often fill the silence, or briefly interrupt its stillness. 

I love the sound of passing cars on wet pavement after it rains. Of my mom’s old clock ticking on my nightstand at home. Of my dad’s heavy footsteps through the kitchen in the morning. Of my mom entering the house and turning on every TV to the same channel, creating a resounding echo.

I think, in all of these years, they have kept her company. Which makes me sad, and happy at the same time. 

It makes me want to give her and my Dad as much love and dedication back to them as I have received, though that seems impossible to do. 

When I picture my mom in a “moment of silence,” I think of us at my grandmother’s house on Maime Lake. We’re at the end of the fishing pier, and she’s perched on the bench with her fishing rod in her left hand, slowly reeling it with her right. 

My legs spilling over the pier’s edge, my toes dangling just above the water’s surface, the sky burning off the last of its day. I had watched her carefully catapult the nightcrawler into the glassy sea of orange and green. The calm and serenity sitting before me envelopes me. 

The calm and serenity sitting before me, that is the sunset and still water.

The calm and serenity that is my mother.

I can not tell you with absolute certainty this picture is from a moment in time. Maybe it is my memory tangled in home footage, rewound in an idyllic vision. 

This feels, though, as vivid as if it were yesterday. As if it were screening at an iMax theatre. As though I were sitting on the pier, with my mom in resounding silence, instead of here, writing this instead.  

I think, in all of these years, the sounds of music have kept me company. 

But my mom’s company, and my dad’s presence, and the lyrics of Chelsea Cutler’s songs, and the excitement in my roommate’s voice, and the train track’s rumble, and the clock’s ticking, and the passing cars have too. 

I look forward to spending more “quiet” moments with them, this year and beyond. I am embracing the quiet, the calm, and the serenity around me. 

And if I don’t feel it, I should be present enough to find it. Because it may not always surround me but it most definitely will always be within me, and will always be found in another sitting before me.