What Happens When We Become Quiet Enough to Notice?

On some evenings, my graduate class meets at the same time Rafi is at jiu jitsu. For a couple of hours I’m on a screen talking about consciousness, and he’s on a mat learning how to get out of someone’s grip.

Then class ends, and there’s a stretch of time before he’s home and the night turns into family time. The house is empty. Nobody needs anything from me.

For a long time I didn’t notice that window, or I noticed it the way you notice an open parking spot, as an opportunity. Laundry, mostly. There is always laundry. There’s also the reading for next week, an email I meant to answer, something for work I could get ahead on. My default setting is productive, and I’m good at it. Given a gap in the day, I will find something to put in it before I’ve fully registered that it’s a gap.

It’s rare for me to be in a space with no one else in it. Between family, teaching, and school, I’m almost always with someone, or on a screen with someone, or in a room full of people waiting for me to tell them what to do next. So the empty house takes a minute to register. Class is over. Rafi isn’t home yet. Nothing is being asked of me.

Lately I’ve been trying something that sounds too simple to write about. I sit down and don’t do anything.

I like having the windows open in the evening. In that window of time I can hear birds, and cars going by, and then long stretches of not much at all. Because I make soundscapes, I’ve spent a lot of time listening to recordings of supposedly quiet places, and I know there’s no such thing as an empty track. There’s always something underneath, the room, the distant road, the hum of whatever is plugged in. My house is the same.

The quiet in it isn’t empty. It just isn’t asking me for anything, which is apparently a very unusual condition in my life.

The laundry is usually somewhere in my line of sight. I can feel the pull of it. It isn’t guilt exactly. It’s more like a hand on my shoulder, the suggestion that I could at least finish one more thing before I sit. Some evenings I lose that argument and fold the towels. Some evenings I don’t. I’d love to tell you I’ve outgrown the argument, but I haven’t. I’ve just started noticing that I’m having it.

Here’s the part that’s a little embarrassing. I have guided rooms full of people into stillness and told them, kindly and sincerely, that there was nothing they needed to do. And in my own kitchen, with no one home, I’ve had to give myself permission to sit there and be.

I notice that word, permission, every time. Who exactly was I waiting on?

When I do sit, what I notice isn’t dramatic. I’m not flooded with insight. Mostly I notice the in between itself: the space where one part of the day has ended and the next hasn’t started, and for the moment I’m not anyone’s teacher or student or anything else. I notice the stillness, and the sound of nothing much, and how unfamiliar both are. How often do I get to just be? Honestly, not often. Most of my days are built so that I don’t have to find out.

I don’t think I’m unusual in this. In 2014, a group of researchers led by the psychologist Timothy Wilson asked people to sit alone in a room with nothing to do but think, for somewhere between six and fifteen minutes. Most of them found it unpleasant. In one version of the study, participants were given the option of pressing a button that delivered a mild electric shock, and a surprising number of them did, including about two thirds of the men, rather than sit there with only their own minds. I would like to think I’d skip the shock.

I’m less sure I’d skip the laundry.

That study gets cited as evidence that people can’t handle their own thoughts, and maybe that’s part of it. What I recognize in it is something quieter. When nothing is required of us, we don’t quite know who we’re supposed to be, so we go find a requirement. A phone is the easiest one. Scrolling feels like rest, but it’s really just a different kind of being asked for something. Productivity is my version. It has the advantage of producing clean towels, which makes it very easy to defend.

In class, I cue the pause at the bottom of the exhale all the time, the brief moment when the breath has gone out and hasn’t come back in yet. Some pranayama traditions give that pause a name, bahya kumbhaka, the outer retention. I tell students not to rush past it. I’m aware it’s exactly the kind of connection a yoga teacher would make, but I’ve started to think my evenings have that pause built into them, that I don’t want to rush past.

What I understand differently now is not very lofty. I used to think getting quiet enough to notice required conditions: a retreat, a long sit, a cushion, an hour I didn’t have. Some of the clearest noticing I’ve done lately has happened in a living room with the windows open, between a class and a car door. It didn’t require me to create anything. It only required me not to fill it.

I’m still not good at it. I just do it more often than I used to.

Maybe yours isn’t between a class and a kid’s practice. Maybe it’s the few minutes you sit in the car in the driveway before going inside. Maybe it’s the waiting room, the school pickup line, the first quiet after everyone’s finally asleep, when your hand is already reaching for your phone before you’ve decided anything.

Maybe it’s the ten minutes before a meeting that you spend answering one more email you could have answered later.

I don’t know what you’d notice in that space. I’m not sure it matters much what you notice the first few times. It may just be birds, a car going by, and the slightly uncomfortable fact that nothing is asking you for anything.

Then, in my house, Rafi comes home, and the evening starts. Most nights I’m glad to hear the door.

Keep going: What Is Sadhana? is about making room for practice in a full life, and Your Dreams Are Speaking in Symbols is another way of noticing. When you're ready to practice, choose a practice here.