Most writing about stillness describes somewhere else: a retreat, a long weekend, a room without anything in it.

The stillness most of us actually get is shorter than that, badly timed and surrounded by noise. Nicole Junkerman on the version that turns up in the middle of a full week, and on why it counts anyway.

A noisy week is not only loud. It is a week in which attention is requested constantly and from several directions at once, so that even the quiet parts are spent waiting for the next request. That is a different thing from volume, and it does not go away when a room goes silent.

Against that, an hour of arranged calm is a slightly odd answer. It has to be scheduled, which means it competes with everything else, and it tends to be the first item dropped when the week gets heavier. The quiet that survives a heavy week is the quiet that was never on the list.

Where it usually turns up

  • In the two minutes between leaving one room and arriving in the next, which nobody has ever put in a diary.
  • In the part of a walk after the first ten minutes, when whatever you set out thinking about has run out of road.
  • While waiting for something slow and mildly inconvenient, a kettle, a bus, a file that will not open.
  • At the very end of an evening, when the day has stopped asking for anything and has not yet become tomorrow.

None of those are impressive and none can be planned, which is exactly what recommends them. They survive a full week because they were never competing with it. They are also unreliable, and I would rather say so than pretend there is a method here.

Why the small version is not a consolation prize

There is a habit of treating brief quiet as a lesser substitute for the real thing, and I think that gets it backwards. A long stretch of calm is wonderful and rare. A short one is ordinary and available, and the ordinary available thing is what a life is actually made of.

It also asks for nothing. No equipment, no appointment, no before and after. Earlier notes here on pausing and on stillness outdoors circle the same idea, and the wider collection sits under mindful living.

Late October is generous about this. The afternoons end early, which puts a natural stop in the day whether or not anyone wanted one, and the gaps between things are a little darker and a little more obvious than they were in July.

So the suggestion, if it even is one, is simply to notice the small quiet when it arrives rather than saving the whole subject for a weekend that may not come. A noisy week has more gaps in it than it appears to from the inside.

Frequently asked questions

Does this mean long periods of quiet are not worth it?
Not at all. They are wonderful and also rare. The point is only that the brief kind is available every week, and treating it as a lesser substitute tends to mean missing it entirely.
Can the small gaps be planned?
Mostly not, and that is part of why they survive a heavy week. Anything scheduled has to compete with everything else that was scheduled, and it usually loses.
What makes a week noisy?
Less the volume than the number of directions attention is being asked from. A silent room in the middle of such a week can still feel like waiting for the next request.

This site shares personal reflections and general writing on meditation, mindfulness, and mental well-being. It does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, therapy, counselling, or crisis support.