Searching for Silence in a City of Sound

I’ve always prided myself on my time management skills. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say I pride myself on the way in which I prioritize how my time is spent. Somehow I’ve always found ways to include valuable space for leisure, reflection, and relationships. I’ve always put my friends before my work. I’ve always put my mental health before my grades. And yet, I’ve almost always done well academically as well as relationally. I felt as though I had some knack for finding the perfect balance, one in which I spend enough time working to be successful, but not too much to the point where I ostracize the people I love by lowering them on my priority list. I never understood the people who were unable to relax, the people who feel uncomfortable slowing down. I lived my life slowly, and I lived it well. I found time for surfing, long conversations on impractical subjects, reading for pleasure, silence, stillness, silliness, and much doing-nothing-ness. Finally, in my last year of college, I find myself tangled in the barbed web of endless motion. I have lost my silent time. I have lost my surfing time. I have lost my doing-nothing time. I have time for little more than the serious and the mundane and the seriously mundane.

I’m writing, not to complain, but rather to apologize to those whom I have previously judged for what I thought was a character flaw, but was, indeed, simply a necessity. I now understand your overwhelming feelings of being stuck in motion, never slowing. I now understand your discomfort with leisure. I understand your need to sometimes choose work over friends. I now understand the feeling of being smaller than the list of this and that and this and that and this and that and this and that which must all be completed by yesterday, only to begin on the this and that which was due this morning. I’m sorry. I now understand.

I’ve felt large. I’ve felt overwhelmed only rarely. I’ve felt my mind be expansive and far-reaching and free to imagine impractical things like rocket-ships and balloons. I’ve never felt smaller than the list before me, until now. My mind feels small. I haven’t believed-six-impossible-things-before-breakfast in weeks. My mind works so furiously on the reasonable and quantifiable that it has no time for the extraordinary.

This Me is new and unfamiliar, and frankly, I don’t much like this Me. This new mentality has been born out of necessity, and it will die when necessity dies. For now I must keep up the charade. But I must be careful that it remains exactly that, a charade. May I only act so seriously if my inner self still possesses an awareness of the absurdity of such a serious Me. May the charade of all-things-adult once more give way to the childish philosophy of my true self. May I return to play; may I burn the suit I wear and the planner in my hand; may I bathe in the joy of the impractical and the imaginary once more.