A reflection by Hannah Lamberth
Image: Nick Fewings on Unsplash
I walk in search of silence,
60 minutes with one instruction:
Quiet.
No washing machine shouting at me
to tell me it’s done;
No Amazon deliveries.
No phone call from school,
Desperately hoping it’s
“nothing to worry about!”
rather than
“Your child’s finger is pointing the wrong way
and you need to take them to A&E.”
No email notifications,
with another task to add to my to-do list.
No shouting from downstairs
as my deaf father-in-law
gives instructions
over the phone
of how to do online banking
to his even deaf-er sister.
Just 60 minutes.
With one instruction:
Quiet.
Except it seems
that the memo wasn’t
delivered.
Not to the cars in the distance,
nor to the planes in the sky,
nor to the workman fixing the lawnmower
with his drill
or the team who’ve chosen this moment
to chainsaw a fallen tree.
The memo wasn’t delivered
to the birds in the trees,
who are mid-choir practice
for tomorrow’s dawn chorus.
Or the sheep
who have evidently started a debate club
and have reached
the passionate conclusion of their arguments.
The memo wasn’t delivered
to the farmer with his plough,
nor the whistling of the passer-by.
And so my walk
in search of silence
feels impossible.
So. much. noise.
None of it louder
than the noise in my mind.
Of my to-do list,
my questions,
my embarrassments,
my failures,
the choices I need to make.
My regrets,
my pride,
my worry,
my question of
“Who am I?”
Did I mention my to-do list?
So how?
How do I escape the noise?
How do I stop and sit
and block. out. the noise?
The silence…
is deafening.
Hannah and Catherine chatted about this during an episode of the Loved Called Gifted podcast, which you can find a link to here (or you can just search for it on your favourite podcasting platform).