Source: bakadesuyo.com

I’m sitting in Hawaii at the moment, and the picture above was my view yesterday evening. We had to wake up at 5am to catch our flight (which was 2am Hawaii time) and that was the third day in a row I had to get up at that hour. While that may be normal for some of you reading this, this is brutal for a night owl like myself.

As I stared at the view above I could literally feel my stress and anxiety flow away. I could sense myself returning back to the guy who can be contemplative and creative. But it often takes a place like this.

Now it isn’t realistic to rely on a gorgeous place like Hawaii to find this sort of balance. That’s why my normal place is on my back patio with our waterfall in the pool running beside me. That is where I normally choose to read and write and reflect.

Where is your place? Where is that place that you have regularly (or occasionally only) where you go to unwind and get back to those things that make you tick? If you feel the stress and busyness of life starting to add up, it may be time to find some silence in your place.

I read an interesting take on the value of silence in a book a few months back and I have been continuing to process it since then. Alan Jacobs wrote about an idea that I had never thought much about before:

“Solitude may be more accessible for modern Westerners than for anyone else in history, but it would be perverse to say that we have too much of it.”

I’ve never stopped to reflect much on the first point of this sentence, but as soon as I thought back to my experiences in traveling I immediately agreed with it. The last country I traveled to was Egypt and I remember telling my wife how quiet it was when I got home. Between the noise of the city and the continual calls to prayer (even through the night), you get used to constant noise.

What we easily forget is the luxury of available silence in our lives.

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This past weekend my Dad and I flew to Amarillo, Texas. That shouldn’t be a long a flight, but apparently there isn’t much demand to fly into Amarillo so we had to stop in Denver (not exactly on our way) first. We were flying Southwest, and apart from the mad rush to get a good seat, this usually means a pleasant experience.

What was unique about our flight over is that while we were loading the plane with passengers, one of the attendants got on the intercom and pointed out that Southwest is known for hard working employees who go above and beyond. Then he drew our attention to our captain for the flight who happened to be helping to load bags outside to help speed our process along.

At first this seemed to instill the reaction that the attendant was going for. Wow, our pilot would do that for us?

But as we discussed it more we were less impressed. The guy who was responsible for our safety as we sat in a giant metal tube in the sky was in the extreme heat loading our bags? Is this really an encouraging sight?

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