A Mother Decides To Try Out Silence

MACLEANS.ca:

Seventeen years ago, the American novelist Anne LeClaire gave up talking to people for two days each month. LeClaire is married to a fisherman and they have a son and a daughter. At home, she ignores phone calls and won’t talk to her husband. When she’s out, she shows people a card that says “I Am Having a Day of Silence.” Now, in a new book, Listening Below the Noise, A Meditation on the Practice of Silence, LeClaire reveals the hurdles and rewards of her “silent meditation.”

She was an unlikely candidate for an oath of silence. “The concept was alien to my personality. In high school, I was once given three detentions in a single study hall because I found it impossible to sit through 40 minutes without talking to the girl next to me.” The idea to stop talking struck her while she was walking on a beach. A disembodied voice told her, “sit in silence,” and, oddly, the voice didn’t frighten her, she says. “For some reason, it did not cause me to panic or question my stability.” And “No, I didn’t think I was being sent messages from heaven.”

The next day, she stopped talking for the first time in her life. She was a work-at-home mom, writing novels and running a small business on the side with her normally supportive husband, Hillary, who resisted her plan at first, calling it “inconvenient” and “frustrating when I need to ask you something and you can’t answer.”

In her office the first day, she noticed, “My writing flowed effortlessly. As I thought about this, I wondered if the energy that was normally dissipated in speech was going instead into the work.” She remembered Picasso’s observation: “Without great solitude no serious work is possible.” The same day, she overheard her husband answer the phone and tell her friend Betsy, “No, she’s not here right now. I’m not sure when she’ll be back.” She thought: “What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect, when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practises it–like a secret vice.”

A friend once asked her, “What do you gain by observing silence?”

“It makes me smarter,” LeClaire said.

Screenshot From Anne LeClaire

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *