One of my great fears in life is an absence of stimulation. And so I subconsciously fill every day with a multitude of plans and goals as a way to hold at bay any existential realities of life’s brevity and of my small place in the grand scheme of things. I don’t think I have realized this quite as clearly as I do at this moment, largely because I was faced, on this day, with a long period of monotony and wondered why I was starting to feel agitated and uncomfortable.
It was a long walk today, fifteen miles. Five of those were in mountainous, muddy forests, about five miles were along roads and through villages, and about five miles were beside a barge canal (with no barges to help distract). The canal route was completely straight, with sycamore trees planted in an exact symmetrical pattern along the route. When I reached it, I was quite relieved to be out of the mud, walking on a paved path on which I could make good time. But twenty minutes down this path, and with more than an hour ahead of me, something started to click that made me anxious. I looked to the field on my right and noted a farmer in his tractor, turning the soil over in preparation for planting. The tractor was moving at exactly the same speed as me, roughly 2.5 miles per hour. (This, incidentally, has become my standard pace on this trip, traveling with a pack on my back, tired legs, sore muscles in my feet, and more eager to soak up the ambience of my surroundings than arrive at whatever my destination is for the day.) The farmer’s large field, at that pace, would take him all day. What would it be like to do something that monotonous for hours and hours on end? Well, today the farmer likely listens to a radio, but for my ancestors, including my grandfather who also maintained a large farm in South Carolina, monotony was simply a fact of life.
Our world has created a thousand and one ways to avoid monotony (what teenagers call “boredom”) through the vast number of things that vie for our attention, endless breaking news, a thirst to stay up to date on many hundreds of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues all over the world, tremendous emphasis and reward on accomplishments and the attainment of things, etc. We all can fill in the blank here. But what happens when those are suddenly stripped away?
That’s where I found myself, even for a brief time of less than two hours. I couldn’t use my airPods lest they run down the battery of my phone which I needed to get me to where I was going. My legs moved in a rhythm of their own, virtually as autonomic as my heartbeat or my breath. The visual stimulation, while lovely, was endlessly the same. I was still a long ways away from my destination, so an eagerness to look forward to resting for the late afternoon was pointless; it would have been an exercise in futility. I was simply in the stillness of time.
I’ve been a morning meditator for nearly fifty years. The silence that I sit in is part and parcel of my self-understanding, and gives me crucial perspective on my day. So why would the absence of stimulation, in the context of this day’s walk, seem strange and uncomfortable? Didn’t I have numerous spiritual resources on which to fall back in times of silence?
When I describe to my music students, or my choirs, the function of rests, and why we it’s the human tendency to push through them as quickly as possible, I say it’s because rests represent death. Death! That which we want to avoid. They are the darkness (blackness, actually) against which the music is the light. They exist together, for without the silence, the rests, the darkness, their would be no music.
So this day gave me the opportunity to ponder one of life’s big questions: What is the balance (for me) between stasis and kinesis? This was the favorite question of my great mentor, friend, and inspiration, Peter Hallock. Small wonder he, and his music, were on my mind this morning when I awoke.
I don’t have an answer to give in this blog. But I will say that, in reaching the exquisitely beautiful, medieval town of Auvillar (yet another of France’s “plus beaux villages”), walking around the ancient town square with its round “Halle” (market place), and dining on a delicious Menu of the Day (a delicious, protein-rich local “canard” – duck), I felt an overwhelming happiness that told me I’m in exactly the right place at the right time.
©2024, Jonathan Dimmock