Three times a year, my husband and I go away for a week. Our friends and family always ask where we’re off to and we give them a location — Egham, Lancaster, Versailles. We tell them a town that they can find on a map, and then we disappear. The truth is that we go to the same place every time. We travel to the silence.
Our journey to the silence is a conscious choice. My husband and I live in very network worlds. Fixed lines, 3G, broadband, Wi-Fi; technology connects us, enables us and exhausts us. Our inboxes are filled daily with a shrieking avalanche of data. Our mobiles charge by the bed at night so we can easily take the calls that start any time after 5 a.m. and continue until at least 11 p.m.
Don’t imagine that being so connected facilitates a great social life. The reality of the world after the economic meltdown is that everyone who still has a job is being pushed to optimize output. There is no redundancy in the system, no back-up, no slack. There is only performance.
The first two days of our journey to the silence are taken up with planes, trains and automobiles. That’s a good thing because the urge to return voice mail is hard to resist. Fingers twitch from keyboard withdrawal. It’s necessary to shut down one’s imagination and stop considering how much work will be waiting after a week of electronic abandonment.
With no one else to talk to, my husband and I share our thoughts with each other. We talk almost non-stop at first. For months we haven’t had the opportunity to discuss more than our daily catastrophes. Finally, we sleep and when we wake up, we hold hands and start walking. Usually, four or five kilometers into our walk we are quiet. The silence finds us.
We are not irresponsible. One person back in our connected madness knows how to reach us. Each day in the evening we check the voice mail at a private mobile number to see if there is any communication from him. That is the only contact with our life outside the silence.
When we return to the Kingdom, within hours the buzzing, bleeping electronic clamor starts again and it is incessant. There will be an attempt to punish us for our journey to serenity. But for a time the influence of the digital demons will be diminished. The silence is powerful and its effect lingers.
So if you’re one of those who sent e-mail asking where I was for the past two weeks — now you know. If you’ve never been to the silence, it’s a journey worth considering. No need to pack batteries for the trip.
