In The Desert, “Deafening Silence” Is No Longer a Clichéd Oxymoron But Instead An Apt Expression Of The Oppressive Quiet That Surrounds Your Quaint, Inconsequential, Existentially Incurious Self
We took our kids to the desert last night, and perhaps it was the reprieve from their game of shout-tag, when they trekked a few dunes over to examine a beach towel buried in the sand that from a distance “looked like a dead body,” but in that brief moment absent their playful shouting, the lack of noise assaulted our auditory and I understood the experience of “deafening silence” - the oppressive pressure of nothing.
It’s a silence that recalls Pascal’s famous quote, “all the wars of the world arise from man’s inability to sit alone in a room with his own thoughts,” but I thought of my lifeguard days and how all of us, after our shift on the stand, would dive in and sink to the bottom of the deep end and simply exist there underwater, close to the drain gate where we would swim to when we needed to pee, we would pause and be still, relieved from the need to know the number of swimmers, and slowly sink, adrift and at peace, before surfacing back into our summer jobs of watching for and preventing drowning.
I love my kids. But they can be soooo loud. Do you know the game of shout-tag? The kid who is “it” chases after the other kids and screams at them until one of those kids covers their ears. Then that kid is “it” and starts chasing and screaming at the other kids, who while not “it,” also seem to be constantly screaming during this game. My kids can play this game for hours.
So, the deafening silence was short-lived and I was sitting beside a couple other parents, all of us astonished at the loudness of the quiet, so there was no time to get existential in the desert. But it’d be nice to go back by myself and sit in the silence and think about how much I miss my family (since I’d be by myself) and how lucky I am to frequently be surrounded by screaming kids.
Have you ever heard the “deafening silence?” What do you think about in the desert? Have you ever parented wearing headphones?
Maybe I should have mentioned, after “scream-tag,” my son cut his finger on a stick he had been poking into the fire and started crying and shouting “ouch ouch ouch, it’s bleeding,” and so I said, “come on,” and we walked through the sand and scaled up the crescent bend of a dune and I led him back to our car and cleaned his cut finger; he winced at the application of the alcohol wipe. After applying Neosporin with an q-tip and fixing a bandaid onto his finger, we walked back to the campfire and our friends. Along the ridge of the bending dune, I held his little hand in mine, and I pointed out Venus in the night sky, and he exclaimed, “I’ve never seen Venus before! I’ve always wanted to see Venus! This is the best day ever!” And I think maybe that is a metaphor for what matters.