As I have gotten older, one of the shifts I have undergone is a preference to keep entirely silent for extended periods. Having experimented with and written about it, I felt my intuition guide me to give it another go this month (September 2022.)
The intent behind this revealed itself to have a triad of facets. The most significant of these was to use the space that silence can create to stay present as I approach the first anniversary of my mother’s passing (13th October.) The other was to focus on what has revealed itself to be of supreme importance in this initial year - unfettered creative expression. The last aspect was to use the space to immerse myself in a period of deep reflection and spiritual exploration aimed at synthesis using Hegel's dialectic method¹.
So, on the 12th evening of this month, I started my latest (and greatest) experiment with silence, intending to go on for a whole month. As I type these words out, I have already crossed the halfway milestone and finished the first phase of the experiment I had envisioned. During this initial phase, the focus was to acclimatize to staying silent and bask in the space that it created, sans any agenda. To play a witness, in other words. To simply be.
In the remaining and upcoming phase, the silence gains some of that intentionality I mentioned earlier. As I feel recharged and inspired after the initial phase of being, the idea is to channel that into immersing myself in being creative and exploring spiritually. I am super excited to enter this phase and hope to document it in another (visually inclined) essay.
See you on the other side!
¹ I discovered Hegel’s dialectic method earlier this year when I revisited a book I had first read during my teens called From Socrates to Sartre. Here is a quick rundown of the method -
an interpretive method, originally used to relate specific entities or events to the absolute idea, in which some assertible proposition (thesis) is necessarily opposed by an equally assertible and apparently contradictory proposition (antithesis),the mutual contradiction being reconciled on a higher level of truth by a third proposition (synthesis).
Source: Dictionary.com