How about you? Where is your quiet place? It’s completely quiet and distraction-free, and thus it’s anxiety- and stress-free, too. My room, however, is intentionally void of these things: no clock, no paintings, no photos, no bookshelf, no nightstand, no noise. But I can hang artwork and other personal embellishments anywhere in the home. Aesthetics are important: art and decorations often add a personal touch to a living space.
I’m not opposed to artwork adorning my walls nor decorations festooning my shelves. It needed to be not only quiet auditorily, but quiet visually.
I didn’t want anything else in my quiet place. I left the walls blank, the wood floor bare. Occasionally, I burned a candle so my olfactory sense-our strongest sense-knew I was in my quiet place. Much like Thoreau’s lakeside plot, my room contained only a few necessary items: a bed for sleeping, a desk for writing, a chair for sitting, and a lamp for reading. Thus, I established my bedroom as my quiet place. But at the Asym House, I was forced to seek quiet when I was in need.
Hard to believe, right? The reason is simpler than one might guess: amid the talking, the visitors, the socializing, the work, the meetings, the stuff-30-year-old-single-guys-do, I found a serene place, a place all my own, a place to which I could retreat when I needed absolute peace.īack in the cabin, peace and quiet became the norm: I was surrounded by deafening silence. One of my recent experiences-living with two single guys in Missoula, Montana’s University District-more closely mimics Thoreau’s experience than the remote cabin. During those months, I committed myself to a great deal of self-exploration, a great deal of writing (I wrote a ton of short stories, including “ Echo Lake“), and a plethora of activities that forced me to better examine my interior life: tending to a fire for warmth, dealing with the loneliness of remote living, living more intentionally out of necessity.
When I moved to a mountainside cabin in Montana for four months, my intention was to tap into a pseudo–Walden Pond experience, one in which I was closer to nature, closer to myself-my interior self-than ever before.
0 kommentar(er)
