I lie awake at night I am troubled by worries and the strategies and plans that I think will save me from the worst outcomes.  Then I realize suddenly that all these things moving around in my head and damaging my spirit and thinning out my sleep are a kind of noise, and that what I really seek is silence.

This is also true in the physical realm.  More than anyone I know I am troubled by the noise of modernity and of others.  Sharp, sudden, jarring noises are painful to me.  Perhaps because of a hearing deficit I have always heard the deep bruising bass of other people’s music as a kind of violence.  Notably, I am never much troubled by the music neighbours play for themselves on a cherished instrument.  The leaven of their creativity perhaps.

In my head is the noise of effortful striving.  The words that I have sought all my life that I now recognize as the vehicle of a troubled mind.  The fearful striving after particular outcomes.  Above all, it is the noise the future makes in the present moment, when that future does not in fact exist beyond my illusion of it.

This is why the Tibetan bowls have been such a consistent accompaniment to my meditation for these past two or three years.  As I listen intently to them I am shutting out all the other forms of noise that keep me from peace.  To someone else they might be noise, to be shunned, but to me they are a spiritual expression, an approximation of the harmony of the Tao, that I am glad to meditate within.

The glad peaceful moments, when the smile might briefly cross my lips: these are simply moments when the noise stops.  What happens next—that is not the same as the future—can take care of itself, and I am at ease in this present.  It is a state distinct from everything I have been taught to be, and it is so far impossible to sustain.  But now and again it returns.

Death will bring a different kind of silence, a perfect silence.  Not good enough.  What I want is the end of noise in this life, when the future, when even tomorrow, shuts up for once.  For the moment, this is my great later-life struggle.

11 December, 2024.