Dr.
Jedidiah’s Diary
Dr. Jedidiah is a psychiatrist who loves traveling,
meeting new people, and exploring different cultures. As a single father who
lost his wife to drug overdose 10 years ago, he has not been his old perky self
for the last decade. During those hard years, he has met hundreds of, thousands
of people from various walks of life around all over the world. Meeting new
people and listening to their stories outside his office have given him
different feelings from the ones through the formal encounter groups or support
groups for therapy. These people he has accidentally come across were the paths
through which Dr. Jedidiah could look back on his own life, being truly honest
with himself. Here is Dr. Jedidiah’s monologue that has left him with some food
for thoughts in life….or some fodder to justify his own mistakes in the past.
Episode
# 7: About Silence in Life
I
met this lady named Lily in my hiking cohort when I had been struggling to
fight loneliness deep in the swamp that I called “the fear of being a widower”
back then. Being surrounded by talkative hikers filled with vim and vigor every
Saturday was my one and only hideout from the fear. I was not a so-called great
mountaineer, but I attended the hiking meets just to forget not only my
emotional anguish but also to attain the bittersweet physical pain accompanied by laborious hours of
reaching the mountain tops.
Among
the happily noisy friends was this quiet woman, Lily, who had the reticulation of lines and wrinkles on
her face, which must have been formed by hardships in her life. She was not easily caught talking with the
others or actively participating in our conversations. I thought she was
painfully unsociable or still reeling
from her own turmoil in life. On the contrary, I was always in the middle
of talkers, sometimes even aggressively debating with them while hiking. Not a
single moment was taken by me to see and savor the beauty of the wild flowers
or grandiose trees around on my way up to the top. When I came back home from
the mountain meets, I fall back into my own deep cave, feeling the inescapable
loneliness that had become even bigger than before the moment I headed out to
meet the group. I turned TV on and pretended that I was interacting with
characters from the show that happened to be on the air at that moment. Every
Saturday night, I found myself writhing
and sinking deeper and deeper into the pit of despair.
One
day, I came up to Lily and asked “Hey, Lily, how are you doing today?” She just
smiled saying quietly “Couldn’t be better”, and then crooned a song to herself looking around the trail as if I was
asking the stupidest question in the world. I felt like a fool asking a rhetorical question but kept asking how
she had always been so calm, relaxed, and
unperturbed without exchanging feelings or ideas with other friends there.
Lily smiled again and asked me back “Are you happy talking and being surrounded
by noise, either intended or unsolicited?”
I stopped for a second and tried to say yes….but wasn’t able to answer her
question with confidence. For all those years, I had been constantly feeling
sad, mad, frustrated, and even dizzy with nothing going on around me. I dreaded
the idea of being alone or in any place with no sound filling the void. I
feared any kind of emptiness. Lily looked me in the eye for a few minutes and
said “Dr. Jedidiah, you need to live in complete silence from time to time. I
don’t mean you should shut yourself away from social life or people. I
mean….savoring the “silence” given or even when not given in life is important
to us all. I don’t feel lonesome when I am hiking alone or strolling in the
trail. Submerging myself in complete
serenity away from worldly noise makes me happy all the time.” She went on to say
that her Aha moment came when she met a man one Sunday at church, who happened
to be a philosopher. The man told her how his life became peaceful by turning
inwards toward inner silence and uncovering forgotten sides of a universe just
as mysterious as outer space. He was the art collector and author Erling Kagge.
Lily’s
words brought a whole new world to me. Nothing physically changed around me but
my own attitude in life started to take a different angle in approaching each
moment given to me. I gradually came to get out of the feeling of loneliness
with or without people next to me. Since I learned what Lily was doing to stay
calm against all odds, I have been zoning out in the midst of unnecessary
debates, listening to the breeze through the leaves, being fully satisfied in
my own rocking chair with no TV, no radio, and laptop turned on in front of me,
but rather be all ears to what my mind says to me at the end of the day. I
started to see some flick of hope through silence in this noisy world.
Expressions
1.
reticulation:
(noun) a pattern or arrangement of interlacing lines resembling a net
2.
to
reel from …: (phrasal verb) to move from side to side as
if you are going to fall while walking or standing to escape from shock/ trauma
3.
to
writhe: (verb) respond with great emotional or physical
discomfort to (a violent or unpleasant feeling or thought).
4.
to
croon: (verb) hum or sing in a soft, low voice, especially in
a sentimental manner
5.
rhetorical
question: (noun) a question asked in order to create a dramatic
effect or to make a point rather than to get an answer
6.
unperturbed:
(adjective) not worried, upset, or disquieted
7.
unsolicited:
(adjective) not asked for or requested
8.
to
submerge: (verb) to put under water
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