Silence golden for one Murray State student

Compare me to shag carpet if you will, but I still hold to the apparently out-of-date notion that bookstores should be places in which you can read. 

So, when I was flipping through a book in the University bookstore a couple weeks ago, I was a bit unhappy when I could barely read the book in my hand because of the blaring radio.

I'm not necessarily criticizing the bookstore, but I bring this instance up because it got me thinking about a lot of other distractions we choose every day.

We have the radio constantly playing in our cars, even for a five-minute dash to Wal-Mart. No longer can we simply make the short walk across campus; we have to chat on our cell phones the entire way. Thank goodness iPods are becoming affordable so we can use them for those rides in the elevator. When we get home in the evening, we immediately switch on the television.

I don't mean to say these gadgets should be the kindling for this fall's homecoming bonfire, or even that they are necessarily negative, but it just seems that we have started using them as means of avoiding quiet. 

Why have we begun to think a few minutes of silence without buzzing distractions is so intolerable?  Truthfully, would it really be a crisis if we did our twenty minutes on the treadmill without the babble of a game show or yet another "reality" program?

Are we afraid?  Maybe so. Perhaps we are afraid of feeling sort of awkward or a little bored (again, is this really a crisis?) But we are more afraid of silence - we stop and think.

Contemplative monk and author Thomas Merton wrote, "If we are afraid of silence, it is perhaps because of our secret despair of inner reconciliation." He goes on to say if we avoid silence, "we will never be able to face ourselves at all:  we will keep running and never stop."

Well, I'm certainly not a philosopher, and the only psychology I know I learned in PSY 180, but I think this makes some sense. For it is when the noise is turned down that we bump into the nagging thoughts and questions we sometimes try to avoid.

Daily musings like, "Am I making enough time for my friends?"; "Why do I really wear this charity bracelet?"; "Should I apologize for what I said to that person yesterday?"; "Should I change my major?"; "I probably should have taken the extra two minutes to sort my trash into recyclable this morning," and even, "I better stop procrastinating on that paper" can really say a lot about who we are. 

Maybe these are the kind of questions we should be listening to, not shoving to the back of our minds to make room for noise.

So my challenge to myself and to all of you is: during the next couple of weeks, let's choose to be a little less distracted, a little less afraid. 

I dare us to turn our music off for the duration of at least one or two songs, to leave the TV off for a half hour or so, and for a couple of afternoons, turn our cell phones, and ourselves, to silent mode.

Brad Modlin is a senior creative writing and organizational communication double major from Bowling Green.