As the result of a brain injury, most of my days are confined to home. And yet, on this little country street, the world still comes to me — people of every age and shape passing by, some stopping for a small, friendly chat. These encounters, and the quiet rituals of home, give me something of what both Vonnegut and Didion name: the meaning found in the ordinary, the life that happens in fragments, the small dances we’re still able to make.
I once told my wife I was going out to buy an envelope: ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘well, you’re not a poor man why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?’ And so I pretended not to hear her and went out to get an envelope because I have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is we’re here on Earth to fart around. Of course, the computers will do us out of that. But what the computer people don’t realise, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.
– Kurt Vonnegut
I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel… These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them…I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of life…
– Joan Didion
It’s hard to choose which words to quote from Charlie Mackesy’s beautiful book The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse. His work carries such quiet wisdom — a reminder of what matters. Charlie is always worth following, on Instagram or wherever his words find you.
Seek out a tree and let it teach you stillness.
Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.
A moment of stillness.
Go outside. Don’t tell anyone and don’t bring your phone. Start walking and keep walking until you no longer know the road like the palm of your hand, because we walk the same roads day in and day out, to the bus and back home and we cease to see. We walk in our sleep and teach our muscles to work without thinking and I dare you to walk where you have not yet walked and I dare you to notice. Don’t try to get anything out of it, because you won’t. Don’t try to make use of it, because you can’t. And that’s the point. Just walk, see, sit down if you like. And be. Just be, whatever you are with whatever you have, and realise that that is enough to be happy. There’s a whole world out there, right outside your window. You’d be a fool to miss it.
There are very few friends that will lie down with you on empty streets in the middle of the night, without a word. No questions, no asking why, just quietly lay there with you, observing the stars, until you’re ready to get back up on your feet again and walk the last bit home, softly holding your hand as a quiet way of saying “I’m here”.
Curating Quietude 