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By Alan Morinis A couple of weeks ago, I helped a small group of people try to revive a woman. My wife, Bev, and I were on a holiday to celebrate Bev’s recovery from hip-replacement surgery. We were squeezing the last minutes from the last day of our week away. We had even let the bus to the airport leave without us, figuring we could catch a taxi a bit later. I was reading the final pages of a book, feeling good that I would get even that done before heading home, when I heard a man seated near me say, “They’re pulling someone out of the water.” I looked up and saw four or five people dragging a woman up onto the beach. “Bev,” I said. “I think they need you.” Bev is a physician and even though it has been almost 30 years since she staffed an emergency ward, I thought perhaps she could help. Bev looked, stood up, and put her new hip to the test of running for the first time. I followed. The woman was unconscious. By the time Bev got there, someone had already tried to find a pulse. None. No breathing either. Bev relieved the person giving CPR and began pumping as hard as she could. Others took over. We rolled the woman onto her side and pounded her back. There was no response to any of our efforts and after half an hour, it was apparent that we would not succeed. Someone reluctantly covered the woman’s face with a beach towel. Then the local doctor showed up and there was nothing more for us to do. We stood around, useless. A few of the women hugged. I looked out over the sea. A quick, hard blow had crashed into that serene and beautiful setting and now there was silence. Yes, the birds continued to sing and the waves continued to roll in; even the speakers from the hotel pool blasted relentless pop music. I could hear it all, but I was standing there frozen within a profound stillness that reverberated beneath the chatter. My ears heard the sound while my heart tuned to the original silence that is always present, even when the moment is filled with noise and speech and music. To encounter that stillness, we have to attune not to the sound but to the silence that accompanies it. I had been thrust into that awareness. Thoughts emerged into the profound stillness. More than thoughts, actually; more like being filled with an experience to which I, inwardly, was observer. First I feel a wave of sadness for a life that had just ended, someone I didn’t know but a soul made in the image and likeness of God. Very soon someone would receive a phone call, and then weep for a mother, a sister, a friend. At that moment, I am only sadness. Then I experience gratitude. Such gratitude. I am living! That same old sun is now illuminating the familiar beach with surreal colors, shade and detail never before seen. Gratitude settles onto the people with whom I share my life, and tears well up. Gratitude, too, for connection to our ancient tradition and the gifts it brings. Who has words adequate to give thanks for the sand between my toes? Other feelings come into the silence too, each adding its shade of color to the inner experience. And then the movement stops and there is again only stillness. An inner richness filled with the original silence. In Pirkei Avot (1:17), Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel says, “All my days have I grown up among the wise and I have not found anything better for a man than silence.” Shlomo ibn Gabirol heard it too. “In seeking wisdom, the first stage is silence,” he wrote. Yes, because the words of even the wise are not adequate to contain the lessons taught by silence. No one can win the argument of truth with that silence. The Mussar teachers speak of two kinds of silence. One is shtikah, an absence of words. The other is dumiya, silence that penetrates so deeply that all becomes still. Shtikah is willed silence. Dumiya is transcendent stillness. Both are important qualities to welcome into a sensitive life. We emerge into this noisy life out of silence, and we ultimately return back to that silence. In between, there is still silence. And stillness. Now too. Listen. |
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