Wisdom Speaks In A Whisper

In the Bible, the prophet Elijah searches for God in wind, earthquake, and fire. But the Lord is not found in any of these cataclysms. Instead, God appears to Elijah in the sound of pure silence. Holiness, we’re meant to learn, is found not in intensity, but in presence.

Our world has grown so loud. Not just with jackhammers and blaring screens, but with the noise of constant contact. Social media has hooked us into endless engagement and trained us, often unconsciously, to extract that engagement from others.

These days, I can’t simply make a piece of art and share it with you: I have to turn it into an eight-week seminar on how you, too, can unleash your creativity, because the algorithm rewards whatever can be shaped into an attention funnel.

And you can’t simply enjoy what I share. You have to document it, package it, turn it into more content. But when everything is content, the result isn’t more creativity: it’s noise.

If no one can be still long enough to be an audience, then there is no art. And this is true not just of art that hangs in museums. Our inner creativity, our ability to hear the voice that is great within us, gets blunted by our refusal to be still.

One sign of this numbing is the loudness of our feelings: we spend more time thinking, texting, and broadcasting elaborate stories about our anger, sadness, and jealousy than actually feeling these emotions. We think our stories are who we are, but they’re often elegant ways of turning away from our deeper pain.

My teacher says that, when you meditate, you should imagine you’re straining to hear a piece of music from far away. Because wisdom speaks in a whisper and will not raise its voice to match our deafness. We are the ones who must grow quiet enough to listen.

Vilhelm Hammershøi, "Interior from the Home of the Artist" (1901)