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Today's
quotation:
Take time to be quiet. This is something that we
don't do enough
in this busy world of ours. We rush,
rush, rush, and we are constantly
listening to noise all
around us. The human heart was meant for times
of
quiet, to peer deep within. It is when we do this
that our hearts
are set free to soar and take flight on
the wings of our own dreams! Schedule some quiet
"dream time" this week. No other
people. No
cell phone. No computer. Just
you, a pad, a pen, and your thoughts.
Jim Rohn
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Today's
Meditation:
It's easy to
want to hear noise-- silence makes many of us
uncomfortable. I've known people who need to
turn on the television set as soon as they enter their
homes, not to watch it but so that they don't have to deal
with the silence in their houses. Some of us need
music playing all the time, and others have their
headphones in constantly, listening to music or audiobooks.
Silence isn't many people's best friend, and that's a
shame because it could be.
Silence
allows our brains to calm down-- the lack of stimuli for
our hearing allows us to stop processing input after
input, noise after noise, sound after sound. We
don't realize just how busy our brains always are when
we're going through our normal day-to-day lives, and many
people find the loss of all those stimuli to be rather
frightening simply because it's something that they
haven't experienced much, not because it's something
that's frightening but because it's something that's
unknown.
But
unknown or not, it can be extremely valuable to us because
it gives us a chance to relax, to ponder, to enjoy, to
relish. Silence can be rejuvenating, making us feel
better in a very short period of time as we get a chance
to just be quiet in a world that always wants to throw
noise our way. While I love to listen to music, I
often turn the music off or just don't turn it on because
I know that my mind and body need silence now and then,
and as nice as music is, it doesn't fill the need for
silence.
The
current challenge with silence, of course, is that we
actively have to seek it out or carve it out, for it's not
all that common in our daily lives. We have to make
a decision to experience silence, and if we don't know how
important it is to us, there's no real reason to do
so. But it's a part of life that can be truly
important, and to neglect silence in favor of sound and
noise can be one of the least helpful decisions that we
ever make. Even if we visit it only occasionally, we
really should make silence a part of our lives.
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