Our ordinary lives are so busy, our days are so full, but we never have any space even to sit for a minute and just be. That’s escape. One of my aunts always kept the radio on, or the television. She didn’t like silence. Silence worried her. Background noise rang out at all times. And we’re all like that. We’re afraid of silence—outer silence, inner silence.
When there’s no noise going on outside we talk to ourselves—opinions and ideas and judgments and rehashes of what happened yesterday or during our childhood; what he said to me; what I said to him. Our fantasies, our daydreams, our hopes, our worries, our fears. There is no silence. Our noisy outer world is but a reflection of the noise inside: our incessant need to be occupied, to be doing something.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do good and necessary things, but there has to be breathing in as well as breathing out. We need to have both the active and the contemplative. We need time to just be with ourselves, and to become genuinely centered, when the mind can just be quiet.
Tenzin Palmo
Leave a Reply