I have a school
teacher friend who everyone describes as inspiring. She recently
accepted a position coaching other teachers. But when I suggested
she has a passion for teaching, she resisted the idea.
“It's important
to me,” she said. “It's my calling. But I don't have a passion
for it.”
We associate
passion with hot feelings. We are passionate when we tango,
passionate when we cook with curry, passionate when we join protests.
But we may balk at using the term to describe a longtime commitment,
and it's almost impossible to think of applying the word to our
search for silence.
Silence is cold. We
know that from reading fiction. Characters confront each other with
chilling silence, tramp in silent, frigid fields, or tremble at the
icy silence of a deserted hallway. It's weird to consider that some
of us actually have a passion for silence.
When first
exploring that need we often experiment with silence observed
in community. Participants come back from such events with a desire
to incorporate times of silence into their everyday lives of work and
family, but it isn't easy. Our culture associates silence with
recluses or the oddly religious who live in monasteries. We feel
strange asking our close people to grant us times of silence, and
worry it will hurt them if we crave solitude.
But with effort, we
can rehabilitate the word silence, in our own minds at least. We can
embrace that it's cool. We can embrace that it's hot. We can give in
to our passion for it.
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