Living the Quiet Life

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snazberries taste like snazberries. Snozzberries? What the hell of a snozzberry? We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the laws.

This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. I put off recording this as long as possible in hopes that I would become unsick and my voice would return to something approaching normal, But time's up, and my voice is still crazy. So I'm really sorry, but you're just gonna have to deal with it on this episode. Living the Quiet Life by Leo Babalta. When I first started simplifying my life about 8 years ago, I remember my life being much busier.

I would say yes to everything and go to lots of social stuff and drive everywhere doing a crazy amount of things, rushing wherever I went. By crazy, I mean it can drive you a bit insane. These days, I know a lot of people who do an amazing amount of socializing online instead of in person, chatting and sending messages and tumbling and posting pictures and status updates. While I understand the need for social connection, I also recognize the addictiveness of it all to the point where we have no quiet. Quiet space is incredibly important to me these days.

I like my quiet mornings where I can drink a nice tea, meditate, and write as the day grows light and the kids are sleeping. I like quiet on my runs and long walks so that I can process my ideas, give my thoughts some space, reflect on my life. The quiet space I allow myself has made possible my writing, but also all the improvements I've made to my life, healthier eating, the exercise habit, meditation, decluttering, procrastinating less, etcetera. Because the quiet space allows me to be more conscious about my actions and gives me the time to consider whether what I'm doing is how I want to live my life. And so while I still socialize, I live a quieter life now.

I have my quiet mornings of meditation, tea, and writing, but also my nice runs, some time drinking tea or working out with a friend, alone time with my wife, reading with my kids, and some time alone with a good novel. Is every minute one of quiet? No. The kids make sure I have some noise in my life, and I'm grateful for that. But the quiet is also how I respond to the noise.

A quiet response is one that absorbs the force of noise with compassion and doesn't throw it back with equal force. Today, I wish the quiet life upon you. Here are some ideas. Create a little quiet space in the morning. When you feel the urge to socialize online, pause.

Give yourself a little quiet instead. When you feel the automatic urge to say yes to an invitation, consider saying no instead, unless it's something that will truly enrich your life. Don't take music on a run or walk. Instead, give yourself space with your thoughts. Make time for the people closest to you.

1 on 1 time is best. Spend some time decluttering and creating peaceful space. Instead of rushing, take a breath and slow down. Have a daily time for reflection. You don't have to do all of these and certainly not all at once.

A slow, happy progression is best. And the quiet space that you create in the world of noise and rushing and distraction is a new world of reflection, peacefulness, and beauty. It's a world of your own, and it's worth living in. Not many of us aspire to lead quiet lives. We aspire to lead lives of significance or successful lives, but I don't think quietness is a virtue that ranks very high.

I know for myself that almost every moment of what could be called downtime is filled with something. A lot of those moments are filled with podcasts. When I'm driving or when I'm walking the dog or when I'm working out, I'm typically listening to a podcast or listening to a book or something because I would hate to waste that time. I'm starting to wonder if that would really be a waste of time. One of my favorite tweets right now has 32,000 retweets.

And it says, there's a guy in this coffee shop sitting at a table, not on his phone, not on a laptop, just drinking coffee, like a psychopath. And, of course, it's funny because it's true. If you saw someone in a coffee shop just sitting there drinking coffee and not doing anything, you would think, what is wrong with that person? They're insane. Don't you know you're wasting time?

Of course, there are lots of good practical reasons for quietness or slowness or stillness in your life. It lets your brain put ideas together in ways that you may not have realized. Like in the last episode, we talked about subconscious information processing, and that's where you have time to let your brain mull over things, and it puts ideas together. It forms things that you may not have been able to form on your own. With quietness or stillness, your brain can come up with new ideas.

Your brain can be refreshed. It can be more creative after a period of quietness or stillness or lack of distraction. There are good, practical reasons to exercise a discipline of quietness, but there's also the argument that we just weren't made for the constant onslaught of information that we have now. These days, we are constantly being barraged with information and push notifications, and it seems to me that my attention span has gotten shorter. It seems that I can forget what I was doing 30 seconds ago.

I'll be doing something, flip over to Twitter, and then completely forget what I was supposed to be doing. For me, this idea of quietness goes hand in hand with impulse control. At this point, my impulse control is pretty weak. If I have the urge or the idea pops into my head to look at Twitter, half a second later, I'm on Twitter. So any moment of downtime when I'm working, when I'm waiting for something to process, or when I'm waiting for something to happen on my computer, I'm over to Twitter.

And that feedback loop just reinforces itself so that when I'm not at my computer and I pull up to a stoplight, that pattern is in my brain and I open up Twitter. Think, oh, well, I'll just look through Twitter while I'm at this stoplight. I've already uninstalled Facebook from my phone, but I think it might be time to try Twitter for a little while. I try to rationalize it and tell myself, no. Twitter is good.

I get a lot of good information from there. But I really don't know how much good I'm getting out of Twitter. For those of us that are Christians, the Bible actually tells us to lead a quiet life and work with your hands. And I don't see my constant use and my constant engagement in social media as being very congruent with that call. I don't think social media is bad, but I think constantly being on it for me is not in line with leading a quiet life, and it's taken away my attention span altogether.

So there are a lot of reasons to try to regain some of that quietness and some of that stillness into your life. The holidays are a great time to do that. The temptation at the holidays is, of course, to be even busier than you are the rest of the year, but your schedule does change a little bit. You have some time off of work and maybe some of that unplanned time, you can just leave blank. You can just schedule nothing.

You can have a cup of coffee with your spouse. You can sit there and just look out the window like a psychopath and see what actually happens if you're alone with yourself for a few minutes. And if you want, you can join me in a challenge. It's gonna be insanely difficult for me, but through the end of the year, I'm taking Twitter off my phone just to see what happens. And I may try it and think, well, that didn't do very much.

But I may try it and find that it makes a huge difference. And it could make a huge difference for you too. It's worth a shot, isn't it? The Music Makers is released every Monday at 9 AM CST. You can find show notes online at musicmakers.fm, or please send me an email and tell me what you think.

Aaron@musicmakers.fm. I would love to hear from you.