Going In

I’m knee deep in my newest purchase: a giant maze of unique fingerprint arabesques spread out before me that delineate Namadgi and Brindabella National Parks. I couldn’t be more thrilled. While focusing almost obsessively on the complexities of the map I can already feel the simplicity of silence…

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Silence is golden, or so the cliché runs. At the least it certainly has a value – one often met in its pursuit. We’re all familiar with its social value, especially in our communication saturated society, but it also has an indirect monetary one, albeit not in a traditional sense. Over the last six months I have been trading in the value of silence both unexpectedly and deliberately.

My first foray into the silence marketplace was neither planned or through an enjoyable circumstance. Diagnosed with type II bipolar disorder earlier this year, I learnt, among a number of things, that rushing thoughts of outrageous positivity and daunting negativity were a part of the disease. Let me make something clear, however, this isn’t another single issue piece on mental illness, but illness was a significant motivator. According to my own very unmedical opinion, my specific illness ran on ’noise’, on highs and lows. Only when the overthinking white noise was switched off, like a range-hood in the kitchen, could I make sense of the highs and lows, and the general perplexity of what had been transpiring.

Unplanned as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and medication were, they formed the basis of the value of silence and the mental health economy. CBT was my first treatment, entirely subsidised, but extremely limited in availability. While an intensely personal experience, it gave me general skills and tools to understand the factors impinging upon my mental health and to deal with the external shocks and derailments. It was a lot like an acquaintance teaching you how to repair the moving parts of your bicycle, but also giving you the confidence to avoid potholes and pedestrians while cycling. In my current balance of work, study, and life however, medication seemed the logical choice and became the point from which I understood the existence of a problem.

Medication, contrary to popular belief, is neither the primary nor most common means of addressing mental illness; prescriptions for mental health medications in Australia account for about $200 million less in government expenditure than non-medicinal treatments and only 10% of spending in the area.[1] These services and treatments, however, express the indirect, hard monetary value of silence.

As awareness of mental health issues has increased in Australia, so too has expenditure on medical services for its treatment. The latest report from Mental Health Services Australia indicates that $7.6 billion was spent on mental health services. From this budget, $908 million was spent on related services including psychologists and support workers, while $788 million was spent on prescription subsidies.[2] While these are mere numbers, they just scratch the surface of a whole business based upon the support and treatment of mental health; or, as I had experienced it—the silencing of ‘noise’.

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Treatments such as CBT and medication, subsidised by government sources, are only the basis of attaining better mental health; much more of the challenge is the personal approach to your own health:my  own silence. In my personal pursuit I tried a few approaches, some more uncomfortable than others, with the idea of experiencing less noise and more silence.

When I began planning to pursue silence actively, the first thing I went for was mindfulness. It’s the buzzword of 2015, the meditation technique you simply must have heard of, whether you’ve coloured within the lines, attended a seminar, or maybe downloaded one of the numerous apps. For the record I’ve never found an app to be overly relaxing.

Mindful meditation is the central practice of the mindfulness movement, however it has to have been one of the more challenging things I’ve ever attempted. I didn’t take to it naturally at all. The idea of sitting still and clearing your mind – actively engaging silence – through a single focus, for five to ten minutes shouldn’t be so hard. But too easily I’d drift to thoughts of dinner or that awkward thing I thought I said to someone yesterday, wondering ’does she hate me now?’ Later, into October, one attempt led to some seriously lopsided sunburns.

Somewhere between the blunt assault on silence and the lack of a concrete goal, mindful meditation lost me.  Meditation doesn’t have a light at the end of the tunnel, there’s no surprise for sticking around, and no solid conclusion. You see, I’m a sucker for linear narrative.

All this meditation business had led me down the rabbit hole of alternate methods of mindfulness. If I’m being a little more honest, the cynic in me found the obvious commercialisation of mindfulness unsettling. Mindfulness has become ‘anti-capitalism’ re-capitalised, nicely packaged and unquestioning of the status quo. While it might actually be our modern work lives or society which are making us feel some of our ills, ‘the mindfulness solution’ is increasingly part of the problem.

Take a look inside your nearest retail chain book store – the few that are left – and you’ll inevitably walk into a wall of ‘adult’ colouring books. Open your mind and allow the body corporate to simultaneously be your poison and cure, quick, buy this colouring book! I had been searching for a little more silence through meditation and that was difficult, but in the intricate patterns of a mindfulness colouring book all I found were the shallow depths of the consumer economy. I couldn’t tell whether I found it rewarding or whether I was hopping on the hippest bandwagon this year. I just wound up overthinking mindfulness itself.

Even in our working lives, one will be increasingly expected to participate in some form of mindfulness.[3] Google, Ford, and Goldman Sachs, are just a few of the large multinationals currently engaging their employees through mindfulness programs. This might be a positive, fulfilling experience—or, to lift a quote from Zoe Krupka, ‘corporates [have] co-opted the art of mindfulness to make us bear the unbearable’.[4] Moreover, we know that our working lives are increasingly unbearable, numerous studies have illustrated this fact.[5] Yet, for the most part, we still follow this corporate lead without questioning our lives.

Silence, I’d found, was a two way street; wanting to achieve some internal equilibrium meant having to accept that lasting gratification and constant communication of social media weren’t complimentary. I’ll admit to having a strong connection to social media. Clearly society itself has an addiction to the connectedness of social media, an attraction to the cacophony of the information whirlwind blowing through countless scrollable platforms. We don’t like to do much about it though, and most studies into it focus on adolescents, almost to hide the fact that twentysomethings –  sometimes even those who’ve matured into supposedly stable thirty year olds – are everywhere on social media. The clamour of social media creates expectations and self-doubt: ‘should I respond to that person?’ ‘Why aren’t I doing that interesting thing, why aren’t I that successful?’

Going silent from social media, however, was actually a very rewarding experience; the single clearest result was replacing internet ennui with productive activity. I stuck to the experience, and ignored messages, emails, and tweets. I actively decided my smartphone was going to be a dumbphone, even if just for weekends. I worried less about how I compared my experience with others’ and I found more time. Like I’d found the bits of time that had slipped down the back of the sofa.

It wasn’t the same silence which mindfulness promised; neither enlightening nor peaceful. It was a practical silence, one which I enjoyed the rewards of. I became more task orientated, I finished what I started in good time – be that the veggie patch planted, the assessment or two I got finished without stress, and, the active time spent with friends. I was, ultimately, less distracted and anxious. I was experiencing the moment much more, rather than overthinking it, but I don’t believe I could go and delete my social media presence right now. Taking more judicious breaks though, that’s a thing I will definitely do.

The physical presence of silence hadn’t been on my mind when I began this search; I’d given existential and modern-communications silence more of my thought already. And with pun intended, I did rather stumble back into bushwalking. With the realisation I’d never actually climbed up the mountains of Canberra’s inner north, and a fair bit of enthusiasm, I set off at a pace. Mounts Majura and Ainslie were knocked-off within a weekend before I spread myself much further afield. A goal, a location to reach, a journey with sights, sounds, smells, and, ultimately, a sense of silence. It wasn’t a ground-breaking experience of silence as such but rather I suppose, a feeling of simple satisfaction, an ‘oh yeah, this is right’ moment.

It turns out I’m hardly alone in my realisation. ‘Mindful walking’ is actually a thing, but mindful walking wasn’t exactly bushwalking. You can find mindful walking on the same list as ‘mindful eating’[6] amongst other five minute exercises designed to fit into your day. These were the same blunt attempts I’d tried out for size earlier, they required active diversion from local stimuli rather I was embracing those stimuli. Clambering amongst the rocky top of Mount Coree was the most silent thing I’d done. Despite going with a friend and being buffeted by wind from all directions I didn’t worry or overthink, I experienced silence and felt peaceful. It was the most mindful thing I had done.

A relationship between walking and silence – the true peace of mind today associated with mindfulness – has been known longer than the internet, five minute guides, and adult colouring books. Others had experienced the benefit long before I decided to climb Mount Majura, and many others have done much more difficult walks for that experience. At the risk of sounding a little passé or naïve, I came across a quote from conservationist and hardcore hiker, John Muir who I thought summed this up nicely: ‘I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.’[7] Even better, bushwalking was an entirely free interaction with our own local environment, something I picked up again serendipitously, and found extremely rewarding.

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Have I found silence, a treatment, a mindfulness technique for you? Most likely not, and I hope not. What I went about doing was very, and honestly, self-centred; for my own health I had decided that pursuing an experience of an intimate, personal silence was a priority. This is what I wrote about here, not a complete argument understanding the concept of silence, but a series of intimate interactions with silence and the subsequent frustration and gratification in the face of its value. That value doesn’t have to be expensive, but it offers a personal, internal value in an age based upon the unnecessarily high speed connection and a marketplace peddling peace of mind.