We so often get bogged down in the day, the week, the month, and fail to savor the minutes within the collection. Sometimes work and life and shuffling from here to there can be so gosh darn overwhelming. It becomes a burden as we scramble to resist cracking under the weight of it all, scraping together some semblance of happiness as we dash along our ingrained ruts to the office, home from the office, to the dinner table, to the couch, to the bed, repeat. And the things that really stand out are the stressful moments at work, the frustrating commutes, the drone of the TV and the worrying about this, that, and it all. It takes you down, robbing you of respites, slivers of joy, and breaths of fresh air among the life smog.
So I'm having a GREAT day, in case it was't quite clear. What I really want to do though is be better at recognizing that a) the above is dramatic and exaggerated but more importantly b) those moments to savor are frequent if you just do the looking, pausing, and reveling.
Mr. Collins could help us understand a bit better. The entire poem describes images in, and of, silence. They're not necessarily humanity's finest moments, but nonetheless they present an opportunity to stop and recognize the opposite of what we usually see. The process of learning to see these silences could help us better weed out what we want from the overwhelming pile we sort through every day. Usually, it's the loud stuff we take on but instead I'm going to try to find the quiet bits tucked here and there. They might provide just the refreshment I need.
Silence
Billy Collins
There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.
The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.
The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.
The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.
And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night
like snow falling in the darkness of the house--
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.
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