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Practical Psychology: Silence, stillness are alternatives for our over-busy lives
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
The Chinese word for “busy” is made of two characters. The first is “heart” and the second is “killing.” For the Chinese, to be busy is to kill the heart. Children raised by insecure parents often learn that the faster they talk, the faster they move, the faster they think, the safer they feel. A moving target is harder to hit. Such children seek safety in the speed of their activity and speech. They take refuge in relentless action. When they feel insecure about what they know, they produce more words and share them in rapid-fire, to hide their perceived ignorance. Constant motion keeps them from being caught. Relentless, busy activity distracts them from experiencing their fear. They are often misdiagnosed as “hyperactive” or having “attention deficit disorder,” when they are actually trying only to protect themselves from a frightening environment. Their constant motion of mouth and body kills their heart. Masking fearDesperate activity often masks our fear of our own insides. When we are still, we may discover our own pain, our own emptiness, our own fear, or our own self-image. So, rather than confront our own thoughts and feelings, we remain focused on outside activity. We run from one task to another with no moment of rest between completion of one and the beginning of another. We may even use speech to keep us from feeling alone. Loneliness also kills the heart’s enthusiastic joy. I know a man who was told by his cardiologist, “Slow down or die!” He was already working only an hour or two per day. Dr. James Lynch discovered that the mere act of speaking elevates our blood pressure by 10 to 50 points after less than 30 seconds of everyday, non-angry, conversational speech. Mahatma Gandhi once said, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.” When overwork and over-talking become our lifestyle, we kill our hearts just a little. The greatest psychological danger in constant busyness is that we neglect ourselves. We lose our awareness of our own needs, thoughts and desires. We lose the capacity to listen, not only to others, but to ourselves. In our constant rush, we forget our own talents, our own abilities, our own gifts, our own worth, our own inner wisdom. We habitually ignore who we really are. And when we are unaware of our value as the persons we genuinely are, we do violence to the heart of our lives — ourselves. Thomas Merton writes, “There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence: activism and overwork. To allow oneself to be carried away by the multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence.” Busyness kills the heart. Stillness as antidoteStillness is the antidote for busyness. Silence is the antidote for talking too much. Perhaps, like the lake, stillness is our natural state. The surface of a lake is always still unless something disturbs it. In stillness, the lake more accurately reflects the reality of the environment. Confusion and distortion arise only when we are too busy or wordy to listen. We know that muddy water becomes clear only when allowed to remain still. All powerful words and phrases are brief. We only weaken the power of our words with excess speech. Taoist Chuang Tzu writes, “Still water is like glass . . . it is a perfect level. The heart of the wise man is tranquil, it is the mirror of heaven and earth. Emptiness, stillness, tranquility, silence, non-action . . . this is the perfect Tao. Wise men here find their resting place” We don’t have to choose between activity and stillness. Life is never exclusively one or the other. We need to create a balance in our lives between action and stillness, between speaking and keeping quiet. In the biblical book of Ecclesiastes there is written: “There is a time for every purpose under heaven, a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.” Balance is the key. Since the Chinese meaning of “busy” is accurate, perhaps the counter balance to killing the heart is found in what Meister Eckhart, the 14th-century Christian mystic, said when he wrote, “nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.” Get ALL of our news...Click here to subscribe to our online edition, a complete replica of our print edition.
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July 5, 2009
3:15 a.m. [ Suggest removal ]
You have just described my life. Great article. Thank you for writing this poetic effigy to those of us in eternal anguish.
I can count on my fingers, with fingers to spare, the amount of times in the entirety of my life that I have felt joy.
I have been ruined from the time I was a child and am incapable of feeling peace, joy, or love. I am in eternal anguish. And your article has given it a poetic form.
Again great article. The heart is definitely killed. Its so deep in me that no amount of silence is enough. I have stilled my thoughts. My emotions. My everything. I have tried all my life to gain any semblance of joy. But is has been raped of me. There is a constant busyness deep in my subconscious. So many traumatizing experiences that they can never all be weeded out in order to allow that joy.
It is within the silence that I know that I am empty and without spirit. There is no stillness for me, even when I am still, and even when my thoughts are stilled. There is no peace in hell and I had arrived there even before my life had began.
I've spent my life writing. Making art. Composing music. And I am now well disciplined at many of these things. They were borne out of my need to express myself, to alleviate all that had built up inside of me, and out of my need to stay busy, constantly busy.
Suffering makes you a very good writer but no gift is worth your joy. It is like the Bible said, "What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul."
- Small