In Praise of Quiet Moments

There was a time in my life when I trav­eled a great deal for my con­sult­ing work. Not every week, but every oth­er I was on a jet some­place to work with client com­pa­nies. The stress of the work was matched by the stress of a chal­leng­ing home life, with two lit­tle kids and a mar­riage that was grad­u­al­ly dis­in­te­grat­ing. (It was like what they say about bank­rupt­cy — it hap­pens lit­tle by lit­tle and then all at once.) In those days, now many years past, the only place where I felt gen­uine­ly at peace was on the plane — in tran­sit. I resolved not to try to be like the oth­er road war­riors I saw around me, busy fin­ish­ing their sales reports and spread sheets. I would look out the win­dow at the clouds or watch the dry lands inch by. Whether I was head­ed to work or head­ed back to my fam­i­ly, I was actu­al­ly on my way to a dif­fer­ent life but did­n’t yet know what that life might be. Hear­ing the purr of jet engines and the hiss of the air vents over­head, was what I then called home. I could rest. I could think. I could sleep.

Qui­et moments. With­out them I’m not sure how I would have got­ten through those years. On the plane I felt like the speak­er in Robert Frost’s most famous poem:

Whose woods these are I think I know.   
His house is in the village though;   
He will not see me stopping here   
To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   
To stop without a farmhouse near   
Between the woods and frozen lake   
The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   
To ask if there is some mistake.   
The only other sound’s the sweep   
Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   
But I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I sleep,   
And miles to go before I sleep.

“The dark­est evening of the year.” That evening is com­ing again in two days time. And this poem, so over-taught and over-quot­ed, nev­er­the­less gets rich­er the old­er I become. It too is about being in tran­sit, half-way between one place and anoth­er; one set of chal­lenges and anoth­er. And when I remem­ber it I, too, know the feel­ing of stop­ping to watch the woods fill up with snow. 

These frag­ile moments are a gift. In ret­ro­spect they may be bit­ter­sweet. But we learn from them; we learn in them some­thing of what life means to us. Nev­er mind the bur­dens at the end — the “miles to go” — this is an inflec­tion point, a sol­stice, a term derived from Latin words for the sun appear­ing to stand still for a moment before revers­ing direction.

It is a moment like the one between breath­ing out and breath­ing in. We can pay atten­tion as we choose. Almost all the time we pass by the inter­vals uncon­scious of their pres­ence. Occa­sion­al­ly, how­ev­er, we may slow things down enough and, if we are lucky, we actu­al­ly stop, just for a moment or two, so that we can tru­ly be in them, step­ping back to notice how love­ly, dark and deep the woods around us are — and what that portends.

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If you are inter­est­ed in refin­ing your capac­i­ty to find inner answers to chal­leng­ing dilem­mas, you may be inter­est­ed in “The Riv­er Lis­tens Work­shop,” held in March 2024 in Sedona, Ari­zona. You can find out more about this small group learn­ing event by access­ing this down­load­able pdf brochure.