When I was but a wee lad, I spent a lot of time thinking. Most of the ideas and thoughts that bounced around in my head went ahead and bounced right out. There were only a few that stuck and a few that I attempted to see if they could be. Most of these were purely philosophical bull shit type questions. One of these questions was the existence of silence.
I thought a lot about silence. I spent a lot of time alone tramping around wherever it was that I could in search of the absence of sound. I quickly found that the colder the weather, the deeper the void of sound was.
Anyone who has spent a winter night on top of mountain where cars are not aloud, where people do not tread (at least very often) and where the snow is high, are probably the closest they will ever be to truly experiencing silence. That void of noise where all is still and all is dead. There is no motion, no disturbing sound. The waves of the air are undisturbed. Peace.
Through this time of seeking for complete silence, it quickly became evident that man cannot experience it. The world can be completely at ease but man cannot. He may sit in the middle of a meadow where nothing stirs. But the fact that he is there, means there is noise for he can never be still. He must always breath. And the sound of breath is never louder than when one is seeking for it to not disturb the surrounding solitude. It bursts the deafening abyss of sound with little respect for those around it. Hold your breath? Sure, then the noise of your head about to explode begins. The pounding in your ears will overwhelm anything that has ever come from outside them. Man cannot be still.
Silence does not exist for us.
But that doesn’t really matter. I wasn’t searching so much for the silence as much as the solitude and peace that existed in the places that I searched. Many of my favorite activities are remnants of this search. Snowshoeing, night riding, backpacking… all contain an element of the silent and all are best done alone.
P. L. and R.