The following essay was originally published on Medium.com on June 9th, 2021
“Listen to silence. It has much to say.” — Rumi
I.
I spent the tender, formative years of my pre-college education going to a Quaker school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was similar to other American prep schools in that it had cliques, field trips, AP classes, and an abundance of amusing contradictions a teenage me could not overlook. For instance, despite the traditional Quaker tenet of nonviolence, we had a football team lovingly referred to as the “fighting Quakers” for which we recruited heavily. It produced no less than three NFL draft picks from the time I started in Kindergarten to when I graduated senior year.
Logical inconsistencies aside, the school was both aesthetically and philosophically impressive. For instance, a row of tall cherry trees ran alongside the exterior of the Meeting Room, where we would gather each week to sit in silence for an hour. During that time, we would practice “expectant waiting,” striving to be in tune with the thoughts and feelings inside of us. Those who felt moved to speak—that is, those who “quaked” with a compulsion to share with the community — stood up and spoke. This practice is called Meeting for Worship in the Quaker faith or “Meeting” for short.
I stood up in Meeting a few times. I don’t remember the things I said but I remember exactly how I felt. For me, the idea of speaking began as an afterthought, something bouncing around in my mind, and then became an impossibility, an ‘I would never actually get up and say this,” before rumination clarified it was something I thought would be valuable to share— and even then I wouldn’t want to stand up.
They say the crescendo of every silence is when you decide to speak. But such a crescendo requires courage, and the social pressure not to break a sustained silence would cause my palms to sweat, my stomach to turn over, and my legs to shake.
At last, I’d stand up, clear my throat, begin with something like “so”, and share my thought.
Afterward, I would sit down. There would be no applause; no feedback. Just the soft thud of my butt returning to the bench, the murmurous shuffling of students adjusting their seats. The lack of feedback could be jarring, but it increased the salience of speaking— as silence stretched into silence, what had been said reverberated in the minds of those present.
This is the first thing Meeting taught me: the power of absence to amplify.
II.
I’ve thought a lot about absence over the past year, and how it relates to the Quaker value of simplicity. My take-away is this: The two are not synonyms. Absence functions at the agent level, at the level of individual things. The absence of something does not guarantee simplicity — that which is taken away can be replaced by something else. Simplicity functions at the systems level, at the level of holistic existence, as the net absence of unnecessary things. Because of this, simplicity is harder to achieve than absence.
III.
At first, I thought the pandemic-necessitated lockdowns and additional restrictions would drive simplicity: After all, what is simpler than eating, sleeping, and working out of the same room? But, upon deeper reflection, I believe such restrictions tend to create absence ( i.e., the lack of individual things), rather than simplicity (i.e., an overall reduction in complexity).
For me at least, new complexities rushed in to replace the old ones: The additional steps and forethought needed to navigate the public space; the technical and emotional challenges of maintaining the same number of commitments digitally rather than physically. I took the same amount of complexity and shrunk it down to the size of my room. In short, my life did not get simpler. It got compressed.
Not only that, but I tended to fill up idle time with things to do: back-to-back Zoom calls, running, podcasts. What’s more, there were times when I’d include things that had no obvious value, such as staying up late reading random articles, engaging in what is known as “revenge bedtime procrastination.” I think I did this for a few reasons: To exert control over my life when I felt I lacked control; to feel like I’d gotten a sufficient amount of enjoyment out of an otherwise boring day; to avoid silence, because silence, I’ve learned, does not necessarily result in good feelings.
Silence, insofar as it is a manifestation of absence, amplifies. And it can amplify fear, anxiety, stress, or grief just as easily as it can amplify positive emotions, such as the connectedness and compassion that result from empathy.
But bad feelings are not necessarily bad to feel. In fact, bad feelings are often necessary parts of getting to empathy. Because of this, they are just as valuable as good ones.
IV.
It is the winter of my senior year of high school. Outside of the Meeting Room, the bare branches of the cherry trees are lined with snow. Partway through Meeting, a classmate of mine stands up. He shares he recently lost his father. When he sits down, I want to offer my condolences, to express my support, but the structure of Meeting means I have to wait. I sit in silence.
After a few minutes, another classmate stands up to share about the loss of her mother many years ago. She does not address the boy directly, but her story touches his. A few minutes later, a teacher stands and speaks on the same subject. Nobody says I’m sorry for your loss. Instead, they demonstrate they understand his loss.
V.
I spent the better half of my senior year at Dartmouth College working on a project to improve the patient experience at our local hospital as part of my human-centered design minor.
Human-centered design is a methodology that emphasizes cultivating empathy for people before defining — and eventually solving — their problem(s). The intended outcome is bottom-up innovation well-aligned with what people want, need, and will use, as opposed to top-down change that, no matter how well-designed, may be misaligned with what people want, need, or will use.
Putting this methodology into practice meant that I would go to the hospital and do a lot of listening; to the stories of patients, providers, or, later in the process, to source solutions or receive feedback on prototypes. My primary equipment was sticky notes, and their effectiveness was a product of how truthfully I could write down what I heard, and later, reflect on what had been said.
I spent more than a handful of nights in the Thayer School of Engineering, sitting in front of a whiteboard diagrammed with sticky notes, reading and rereading those little paper snapshots of sentiment. The silence gave them space to echo. I couldn’t cross-examine or engage in a conversation. I had to imagine what these people thought and felt, what they heard, saw, and did in their daily lives.
In hindsight, I think it was Meeting for Worship with sticky notes.
VI.
In psychology, the Zeigarnik effect tells us that unresolved topics stick in our minds better than resolved topics. In Meeting, all topics are unresolved topics, and the drive to resolve them to free up mind space can be strong.
This is the second thing Meeting taught me: we have a tendency to offer premature solutions to avoid feeling the discomfort of unresolved problems.
The third thing Meeting taught me was that we should resist this compulsion. Human-centered design teaches the same.
VII.
Recently, I visited my father in Chicago. He was diagnosed with cancer a few months ago and has just begun chemotherapy, but you wouldn’t know that from the time we had. From exploring the city to going out to eat to running a track race, we lived more together in those three weeks than we had since I left for college.
Still, I worried about him, and perhaps it was due to the strange transference of emotions that I found myself on the plane ride back worrying about all the things I needed to do when I landed in D.C. My mind flipped through chores, work, bills, and appointments trying to determine the optimal order to resolve each pending item. It even pulled the good, enjoyable things into the frenzied algorithm: when would I visit my grandmother now that she and I were both vaccinated?
I tried to work through my options by planning a trip that would check multiple items off of my mental list. But when I opened Google Maps to plot the best route, I found my phone was not connected to the internet. A pop-up appeared offering me the option to purchase in-flight Wifi. I declined, picked up my book, and began to read. After a few minutes, I noticed my mind wandering back to the unresolved problems at hand. So I closed my book and shut my eyes.
It was dark and dry inside the cabin. The dim roar of hurtling through the sky dampened all other sounds and eventually disappeared entirely itself. From time to time, I opened my eyes to look at the people around me. Some were reading. Some were looking at their phones. Some were doing nothing in particular that I could discern.
Finally calm, I thought to myself, what a strange and wonderful thing it is to sit in silence with people once again.
VIII.
It is Spring, and the cherry blossoms outside of the Meeting Room have bloomed. After a year of hard work, I am sitting in silence with the rest of the senior class, watching the trees outside shed pink petals in the breeze. The hour elapses. From the Facing Bench, a teacher turns and shakes the hand of the student next to her. The action ripples through the benches and soon we are all shaking hands, acknowledging one another before we break for the day.
IX.
Despite the reopenings in the U.S., despite the concerts, cocktails, parties, and reverie all made possible by vaccination, when I close my eyes, it is the image of the cherry trees that comes to mind. Why this image? Because it exists just prior to parting. Friends parting ways to go off to college; friends parting ways to take jobs in new cities now that it’s safe to travel again. Friends joining a sports league halfway across town. Friends announcing their resignation before going to grad school. Friends breathing a sigh of relief now that their kids can return to daycare. Friends worrying about leaving their puppy alone at home if they have to return to the office.
Cherry trees dropping blossoms before the summer does not romanticize the absence of the past, nor does it portend a perfect future. It is a marker in time, a transitionary image. It reminds us to go forth and live simply, to be attuned to ourselves and to others, to slow down and practice empathy despite the rushing pace of life.