Marcel Legros - Play the Game of Life

“I’m on Holidays - Part Deux”

I’m on holidays all week to enjoy some quality camping with my family. I’m probably mountain biking a new trail or burning my dinner as you read this. Here’s Day 2 of my random holiday thoughts - random passages taken from a few of my favourite books. I’ve included an Amazon link if you’re interested in reading more of this great book. I hope you enjoy today’s passage and see you when I get back!

“There is no such thing as pure silence, not in the world we know. Pure silence is an ideal, an infinite quality like “emptiness” or “perfection.” We can think about it. We can approach it more and more closely and feel its pull. But as an experiential reality it is impossible - impossible because we are alive. Our body of blood and breath is a raucous machine. Our very ears produce sound, or the clear sensation of it. Existence itself is full of noisy energy, not empty anywhere. A recent issue of Science News refers to a vacuum as a “seething sea of electromagnetic fields… a giant reservoir into which excited atoms can deposit photons.”
And yet we do not experience what can be called relative quiet, the impression of silence, and this can be vivid and compelling. We are drawn toward it. We are hungry for it and it nourishes us. In a brief moment of quiet sitting we can realize how tranquility is the precondition for listening. Our sense of silence is the other side of our sense of sound, and gives definition and wholeness to it. It is a touchstone, the gut check which triggers creativity.”

Source: “The Listening Book” - W.A. Mathieu - Page 69