Blog

Sounds and silence and headspace

A final reflection on music for writing (see the first and second parts here).

In this reflection (which first existed as a part of my current Masters study), I look at what we are really doing when we use quiet or music for making a headspace. Is it creating silence? Is that silence for reflection? Is it tuning out the noise? Is it turning off the chatter in our heads? Is it providing a prompt for to get up and dance?

***

So when is silence to do with the absence of noise, and when is it the absence of noise we don’t want? 

People who go on silent retreats a lot (and you can imagine I know a lot of them) say it takes at least a day, and sometimes 3, of being in silence before the ‘inner chatter’ calms down, before there is true silence.

Some people find birdsong and tibetan bells and rushing water and white noise a good way to cut out the chatter. One of my Shut Up and Write buddies recommends this café soundtrack; another recommends the sound of a crackling fire mixed with the sound of falling rain to mask other noise and get her in the writing mood. Unfortunately, all these white noises just make me feel sea sick… (though I do really like the real sounds of working in a café, of rain falling on a tin roof, of a wood fire burning, or indeed of music.)

And when is the ‘noise’ or the ‘chatter’ inaudible, but visual or textual? Is it silent when we ‘shut up and write‘? Is it silent when I sit, dissociated from the other people in my tram, reading my Twitter feed? Was it silent when Mr Bennet retired from his family of girls to his library?

When I was doing my PhD, I needed to find lots of ways to return to my body, to be mindful and present (instead of thinking and reading and writing about things that happened 60 years ago). I made bread. I weeded my allotment. I sat in the sun and watched the dragonflies flit around my potted water garden.

More recently, I’ve found total engagement in physical activity helps me to turn off the chatter in my head.

Last semester I was working All. The. Hours. I was teaching a master’s course that had blown up from 20 enrolments to 60 on the day the course started. I had been forcibly seconded to the Giant Web Project of Doom. I had an article that was going badly, and various minor teaching gigs that I’d already said yes to. I had just about pulled it together, I had ended up running the Giant Web Project and made it manageable web project that was about to go live, when a senior manager threw a totally unexpected spanner in the works. I was ropeable. So I went to No Lights, No Lycra and stood in the semi-dark, not speaking, with 70 strangers and danced my heart out. I came home a different person.

This is what they started with:

I guess silence is not monolithic, and what matters is not sound/not-sound, images/blank, together/alone… but a place where you can stop, feel safe, find calm. A way to retreat and then return to engagement, however that might work for each of us. 

***

Each of these posts has garnered a huge response–thank you! The diversity has been fascinating, but also the fact that none of us are alone, even in our ways of constructing solitude. What do you use to create ‘space’?

SHARE

Succeeding in a Research Higher Degree

Doing a Research Higher Degree (like a PhD) is hard, but lots of people have succeeded and you can too. It’s easier if you understand how it works, this blog gives you the insider view.

Contact

Related Posts

Writing Well and Being Well for Your PhD and Beyond is published

It’s publication week for Writing Well and Being Well for Your PhD and Beyond: How to Cultivate a Strong and Sustainable Writing Practice for Life. It’s available as a paperback and ebook on all the big book websites, and via the publisher. As with all my books, I’m delighted if you buy a copy but also delighted if you recommend it to your university library so you get to read it and so does everyone else.

I had the best time writing this book, and the pre-readers have given such warm and delightful feedback. My series editor described the book as ‘your best friend’; ‘it’s personable, relatable, oozing with strategies.. It simply is a gift’. The peer reviewers said things like: it’s ‘calming and supportive’, ‘a useful review and re-thinking of the writing process’ that ‘gives permission’ for you to write, containing a ‘sprinkling of humour’ but also ‘addictively practical’.

Read More

What I learned from tracking my writing for a year

Back in 2021, I tracked my writing for a year. I kept a done diary for 6 months (as I’ve previously written about on the blog), but I also met up every month with an old co-author and we each wrote a little report on what we’d been doing: what was growing in the garden, what we were eating, what was going on in the world, what we were doing to move, what we were reading, but also what we were doing to progress our next writing project.

Read More

Towards a theory of University ‘excellence’

Universities like to say they are ‘excellent’. It’s a buzz word, and when you’ve been around campuses for a while, you realise it’s an adjective that’s applied to absolutely everything, so it kind of ends up meaning nothing. But when we look around universities, we see lots of ways they aren’t great. But recently I worked with another major partner in the global higher education industry (who is not a university) and it helped me see why ‘excellence’ discourse is good, actually.

Read More

Get the latest blog posts

%d bloggers like this: