Saturday, January 31, 1998

We don't have to surrender to noise

By Ken Garfield / Knight Ridder Newspapers

I've begun craving the quiet more than ever. That should come as no surprise, seeing how I have a wife and two teen-agers at home and a voice-mail system at work that was crammed with 22 messages when I returned this week from three days off.

This is a noisy, jangling world that gives us far too little time to gather ourselves. If you have a family or a telephone, you know what I mean.

That's why I relish the hour or so at night after the kids have gone to bed, when the house has settled down and I can be alone with my thoughts (and the remote control).

It's why I appreciate Sundays, when church and tradition are still powerful enough to inspire many people to preserve at least this one day of rest.

And it's why I am fascinated by the giant step that James Otis of Austin, Texas, has taken to bring sanity to his life. As Otis explained recently in the New York Times Magazine, he stopped talking on Sunday. The guy doesn't open his mouth, except maybe to let out a relaxing yawn.

Otis doesn't mean to be weird. His only goal is to step back from the world far enough to appreciate it more: "I wasn't trying to withdraw from the world so much as to look at it more carefully."

Otis went Sunday-mum more than three years ago, motivated by the death of his grandfather and his work helping a professor write a book about Mohandas Gandhi. "A periodical decree of silence is not a torture but a blessing," wrote Gandhi, the Indian pacifist who kept a weekly day of silence.

Otis, a documentary filmmaker whose work includes a piece on the CIA, decided to limit Sunday communication to notes, nods and e-mail. He printed a card that states "I don't speak on Sundays" and hands it to cabbies, waiters and anyone else with a question.

He quickly settled into a mellow routine. Sitting in the backyard. Naps. Daydreams. A book. Some Sundays end with a silent movie. Sometimes, silence turns out to be golden. When he politely declined to answer an airline ticket agent's inquiry about aisle or window, she was so baffled she bumped him up to first class.

He even went out on a nonverbal first date. She did all the talking. He said it was his greatest date.

There are definite down sides to Sunday's silence. A fight on Saturday night goes unresolved. A brunch with friends is frustrating. However strong your emotions, there's no way to articulate them to a loved one.

But the frustration is outweighed by the flashes of discovery.

"Silence is powerful, peaceful and simple," he wrote. "It's also wild and a little scary. As a participant or observer, conflict, humor, cooking, sex, exercise and violence are all very different in silence.

"Most of my important decisions are made on my quiet days. On Mondays, I always feel more settled and secure, hesitant, nonetheless, to join the talking world."

My life is too full to take a vow of Sunday silence. I'd break it the first time my kids begged me to go outside, play and chatter. Your life is probably too rich as well to retreat so radically from it.

But that doesn't mean we have to surrender to noise. Somewhere between Otis' silence and our commotion, we can find a place to live.

Maybe it means letting the phone go unanswered. Or taking a long walk, more for solitude than exercise. Or exploring some form of meditation. Or sitting up late one night, staring at the oaks outside, not thinking about anything.

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(Ken Garfield is the religion editor at The Charlotte Observer. Write to him at: The Charlotte Observer, 600 S. Tryon St., Charlotte, NC 28232.)

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(c) 1998, The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.).

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