Upper East Side, October 2006

From last night:

My apartment is quiet as I write this. My cat is lying on the couch, watching me with bored disinterest through half-lidded eyes. The overhead light glows in soft-focus in the finish on my coffee table. Sure, my steam radiator is faintly hissing, and there’s a siren outside on Third Avenue. But in New York, this passes for quiet.

These past few weeks have reminded me that I’ve got to aggressively seek quiet time, time to breathe and sit and experience the depth and vastness of each moment. I touched on this yesterday when I mentioned sitting, but even when I’m not sitting, I need to be more careful about reserving time and space for myself.

Like many of us, I tend to get swept along by the current of daily activities, and I wind up doing insane things like going to four stage shows in one weekend (last weekend), bracketed by trips to the gym, dinners and lunches with friends, board meetings and committee meetings and volunteer work. Don’t get me wrong: I love my friends, I’m glad I get invited out, and I certainly wouldn’t want that to end. But I tend to let my quiet time be merely the time I’m not doing something else, and it erodes in the current until there’s almost none left.

So I’m going to work harder to make quiet time happen. I’m going to schedule it into my calendar. I need to notice the quiet hiss of my radiator, and the distant sounds of the traffic on a cold night, and the soft golden glow of the overhead light.