Nyepi – The Day of Silence: My thoughts on communication and silence

Nyepi on the news

I’ve just read about Nyepi, The Day of Silence, that is a Hindu celebration on (mainly) Bali today (March 17th). Normally, there isn’t really an article on Hindu celebrations on the news here in Germany, and maybe it was on the news today, because “even the internet is down today”, as the article says. My initial reaction was: Wow, how great is this? Apart from the background of Nyepi, which (if I’ve understood it correctly) is mainly about greeting the new year and vanquish demons and evil spirits from the island, it is also a day to reflect, a day of calm, of silence.
And I feel that many societies are lacking time of calm, of reflection these days, also, I’ve had a few experiences with “the internet” or rather the possibility to be reached on most placed on the planet today, as long as there’s internet coverage. All these things came into my mind and I’d like to share a few thoughts.

Communication in the 1980s and early 1990s

I was born in 1974. When I was a kid and still a juvenile, it was common to communicate either in person, or to write letters. Talking on the phone (landline, of course) became more and more common, too, but for example my grandparents didn’t have a landline until the mid-1980s, and in those days using the phone could really get expensive, too, especially if you had someone on the line who didn’t live in the same city as you did. If you called someone and he/she wasn’t at home or didn’t want to pick up the phone, you just had to try again – answering machines were not common until the 1990s here, or at least not in my family.

The downward spiral

During the last years, I’ve more than once looked back on those days and thought that I would really like to take a few steps back, at least communication-wise. Even more, I have tried to do this. Only two years ago, I had felt I had kind of spiraled down into a state in which most people around me would only communicate in text messages and – what was much worse to me – expected an immediate answer. I didn’t want to do this anymore. I had and have to somehow do this in my “work life”, or rather day job life, since I am self-employed and there is obviously no one who will answer instead of me if there’s an offer to work on something. But even in this context – I went back from immediately answering emails or calls to waiting at least one day. And guess what? It doesn’t only work, it works better. Because I’m taking time when I actually have the time instead of answering in the middle of something else and therefore having the constant feeling of being hassled.
Well, apart from my work life, I had – like many others – also started using messaging Apps for private purposes. And like I said above – people whom I hadn’t seen or talked to in literally month would start writing “texts” that consisted of two or three words, and seriously expecting answers. I had the feeling that it got worse after there was the possibility to see when a message had been read (which I disabled immediately), I could at some point physically feel the fingers knocking in impatience, waiting that I would “finally” react, since I had “already” read the message one hour or so ago. And it didn’t really help that I started to change my behavior, i.e. waited longer and longer before I would answer, the expectations didn’t change, even more, some people became quite demanding – “Oh, do I finally hear something, after one week? I thought you were dead.” Yeah, sure. Then I started to go back in my mind to those days when we would write letters, and it would take two or three days for a letter to arrive and then the recipient needed to take time to answer, find a post office etc. etc. You see where I am getting at.

Changing backwards

I’ve cut some chords during that time, or maybe you can say that some chords cut themselves. The same people with whom I had written letters about 25 years ago, can’t find the time to put one short sentence on a postcard these days. Not all, of course. But I realized how the “possibilities” (which sounds too positive to me) have had an effect on behavior.
On my behavior, too, obviously. I’ve always been someone who likes to think. About everything. About myself, about other people, about scientific problems or questions, about the future, about the past, about thought experiments, about storylines, about politics, about sports, about nature. Which is probably why the news on “The Day of Silence” appealed to me so strongly. To me, this is heaven. I’ve spent so much time during my life just sitting somewhere and thinking. But I had lost track of this, I came to realize a few years ago that I had let myself being “sucked in” this downward spiral of believing that I never had time, that I had to do everything immediately, or more precise, to react immediately. Not because I had made the conscious decision that this was what I wanted, but because “that’s just how it is today”. I had lost control over myself in this regard.

I’d say that I have made huge progress during the last years, paying attention to what is important to me again, and also acting accordingly. But still I feel like I want to try “more less”, so to speak. The first time I travelled to a far away country – more than 20 years ago – there was simply no means of easily reaching someone or being reached. That it was only me on the other side of the world, walking the streets, relying on my own sense of direction, not on the GPS and an App. To me, this came with an incredible feeling of freedom that I do still strongly remember – and that I am in some ways missing. Of course, that’s in my hand. I don’t need to take my mobile or laptop with me when I’m travelling. You might say that I could still take it with me, but I don’t have to use it. True. But I’ve experienced that the mere possibility, lying in front of me on the desk, is already a huge difference, it’s already “too much”, at least for me. So I would have to leave these things at home. And I am more than surprised, even shocked, that I hesitate to do this, that I even felt “naked” once because I forgot the mobile at home – and I was only away to go shopping for an hour or so! So apparently, I’ve changed my behavior, and it’s something I think about a lot, and something that I intend to work on.

Waiting isn’t waiting

Especially after I had made an interesting experience last year: I had written a letter to a great aunt of mine, we are not very close and it was the first contact for quite some time. But I knew that she is the kind of person who would definitely answer, and also answer with a letter. The interesting experience was: The feeling I had when I waited for her letter was completely different from waiting for an email or telephone call. I was excited like I used to be decades ago, when I knew or at least hoped someone would write a letter, I would wait at the window for the post man, couldn’t wait until he had walked past the five or six houses that came before ours, and sometime I would even go the the entrance door and – since mail was always thrown right into the hallway – wait right behind the door, see the mail fall down to the ground and immediately seeing if there was a handwriting I knew, if I had received what I had hoped and waited for.
That I had this feeling again, only because I was waiting for one letter, surprised me. But it also encouraged me to go further down this path – or go back, if you want.

It’s worth it

The Day of Silence might be a good thing every once in a while. Not only going offline and concentrating on your thoughts and feelings instead of exterior stimuli, but also communicating offline, taking time to think about what you’d like to express, making the effort to meet and sit down with some one or grab paper and a pen and write down things without spell check and autocorrect, go to a post office even when it’s raining, and hoping the person you’re writing to will appreciate your effort as you will vice versa.