Leigh Marz
speaker
48 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Leigh Marz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, there's a great story of John Cage, the famous composer walking into an anechoic chamber. He was very excited about silence as a musician. He certainly understood the importance of silence, the silence between the notes that makes music what it is.
So he walked into this anechoic chamber in Harvard University, and when he got in there, he heard two sounds, a high-pitched sound and a low-pitched whooshing. And so we stepped outside again after a while and asked the engineer, well, wait a minute, that room wasn't silent at all. I heard this high pitch. I heard this low pitch. And the engineer said, ah, the high is your nervous system.
And the low is your blood in circulation. So we asked this question, is there even really a thing as silence as pure silence in a world that is vibrating and whooshing and whirling? And, and the answer is probably not, but there is an experience of silence, an experience of our attention, being able to put it where we want it, where we intend it.
Well, you're right in that when we're talking about noise, we're talking about unwanted distractions. So that is different from sound or certainly music and things like that. It's also different on the informational level from data, which is neutral. We like data. Or internally, it's also different from thought, which we also enjoy. So the distinction is that unwanted distraction.
Well, we wrote this book not for the people who can run off to retreats for six months at a time. We really wrote this book for people looking for silence in their noise-soaked homes. full lives. And we argue that you can find those micro moments and those micro moments for finding quiet can make a big difference.
So that can be even when you find yourself stuck in a long line unexpectedly, or maybe you're commuting and your radio or podcast goes out, that you could actually welcome that silence, sink into it. And take advantage of that unstructured time and that open space to just not have information again coming in to you all the time, but to just appreciate the openness of that.
no one's really doing that study. And so we say, like, do the study yourself. Notice what really the difference is. So the signals in the body that tell us that we are saturated by noise are different for each one of us. But I'll tell you mine, for example. I notice a clenching in my jaw when I'm feeling saturated by noise.
notice an irritability with those i love most i confess and i'll notice that i'll start to kind of lose track of things i'm repeating tasks or you know going back over i'm things are falling through the cracks so that's when i'm saturated with noise those are the signals that's the evidence if you will and then when i am actually getting enough quiet what i'll notice is that my creative thinking is much more amplified i'm more generous with myself with my time with others i
do more favors for people i just feel more abundance in life and so for each of us it's to look at really what are the signals that were saturated by noise and how can we take care of that maybe turn down the dial a bit and what are the signals that we are finding the silence that we need and require to really be the kind of person that we want to be in this world
Well, it's like, I think we think of it as sort of it's the place to start because in this noise-soaked environment where it is so loud and jarring and the impact of that on our health is, you know, is without question. It's the science we lay it out. And then the desire to get into a place of a quieter internal state, it just doesn't require absolute silence on the outside.
Although that could help, that does help some, but you mentioned for yourself, it's maybe a little better to have a soundtrack or a podcast or a different place to focus. And so we're just trying to create a little bit more space for the ways that we find that internal silence that is so nourishing to us, that helps us get
clear on what it is we care most about, where we put our energies, and what is true in our life. And that could be in a loud environment, like I said, sort of like in my dance studio. That's how it is. It's loud, but I'm quiet.
The Quakers have been doing that for hundreds of years. When there's a sense of polarity or positionality or rigidity in a meeting, the clerk will call for silence. And in that silence, an answer will come, some resolution.
And so even if it means like, you know, taking a break from the problem at hand, sleeping on it for a night and coming back together, just giving a little space to it, clarity can come through that place.
I know if silence is so good for us, why aren't we doing more of it? There's a few answers to that. I mean, there might be some things that we're, you know, uncomfortable with or not wanting to face about our lives or behavior or whatever the way things are going that make it challenging and certainly challenging. Nietzsche spoke of that years, hundreds of years ago, the horror of the vacuum.
So, and my teenager will tell you awkward silence is the worst thing under the sun to go through. So there's, I think some nervousness and varying degrees of fear. So it's not just our personal choices that we're not, you know, choosing silence when it's so clearly good for us.
It's also we have systems that are driving towards more content and data, whether it's eyeballs on a page and click through there. Our pristine attention is valued at zero or time playing with children or looking at art or walking through nature. But if we're clicking through and eyeballs on a page, it's being valued by GDP. So we're set up, the system is set up to make noise.
So it's not just our own personal, you know, failings here. There are things we can do to bring more silence to our lives, but there's also a system that's driving us towards making more and more noise.
Apparently not. But there is a lot of value, which takes us back to that silence is golden. So speech is silver, silence is golden is that aphorism that shows up in cultures all over the world. And the polymath Thomas Carlyle, he liked to think of that as speeches of time, silences of eternity.
Yeah, I think for many of us, it's a new terrain. And yet it's pretty old technology, if you think about it, just allowing for space for people to be together. There's certainly cultures that value that more. We look at Japanese ancient principle called ma. where the empty space is seen as pure potentiality.
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