In a way, silence is the opposition to all of this. It’s about getting inside what you are doing. Experiencing rather than overthinking. Allowing each moment to be big enough. Not living through other people and other things. Shutting out the world and fashioning your own silence whenever you run, cook food, have sex, study, chat, work, think of a new idea, read or dance.” Kagge also tries to use Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence" to boost his case (weird, as music, including that song, is somewhat of a sound-based phenomenon), and says things like, "I have more faith in Steve Jobs as a responsible father than as a visionary marketing genius" because apparently Jobs "limited his own children's access to Apple products." Lol okay. So Kagge has really done his research on Jobs, then. I’m old enough to remember being deeply bored during my childhood: in a 70s home, once children’s TV had finished and you’d read all your books, it really was possible to be very, very bored.

Yaklaşık bir yıldır penceremden birkaç binanın yükselişini izliyorum. Toprağın kazılmasını, katların biçimlenmesini. İzlemekle kalmıyor onu dinliyorum da. Müthiş bir gürültü. Pazar sabahları da dahil olmak üzere.. Kulaklarımı tırmalıyor ama uyumaya devam ediyorum.They are still curious, but their faces are not as childish, more adult, and their heads are now filled with more ambitions than questions. None of them had any interest in discussing the subject of silence, so, to invoke it, I told them about two friends of mine who had decided to climb Mount Everest. He obviously experienced a lot of silence when he trekked across Antarctica alone for 50 days. But this isn’t a book about the exploration of remote places. This is a book about the silence within, the kind of silence that is found on a crowded subway or a barren mountaintop. In fact, according to Kagge, you have to find it on the crowded subway. That is life. And that is when you need it most. we fear death to varying degrees, but the fear of not having lived is even stronger. That fear increases towards the end of life, when you understand that it will soon be too late.” They lie there in silence, looking no different, more or less, to the way they were the last time I saw them, 22 years ago.

I thought this was excellent advice, and finding a woodland trail or something similar is now much more preferable to me than walking on pavement or flat earth. Not just because it's more difficult but because it's harder to think about other things because it's more difficult. A joyful celebration of what feels like a precious resource that is . . . in too short supply.” —On Air, NPR I find myself thinking about how silence can be experienced without the use of techniques. The threshold for finding silence and balance can in fact be lowered. You don’t need a course in silence or relaxation to be able simply to pause. Silence can be anywhere, any time – it’s just in front of your nose. I create it for myself as I walk up the stairs, prepare food or merely focus on my breathing. Sure, we are all part of the same world, but the potential wealth of being an island for yourself is something you carry around with you all the time. Which paths lead to silence? Certainly trips into the wild. Leave your electronics at home, take off in one direction until there’s nothing around you. Be alone for three days. Don’t talk to anyone. Gradually you will rediscover other sides of yourself.”

Success!

And so, this little book is a collection of 33 meditations on the meaning of silence, of quiet and of stillness. And it’s a quest for ways to achieve that. The author has been to great extremes to do it. He’s a polar adventurer, but his expeditions were not purely searching for silence, but discovering it was a blessing that emerged unexpectedly from his trip. And he continues to try to find that in his “normal” life. It is easy to assume that the essence of technology is technology itself, but that is wrong. The essence is you and me. It’s about how we are altered by the technology we employ, what we hope to learn, our relationship with nature, those we love, the time we spend, the energy that is consumed and how much freedome we relinquish to technology. When you’ve invested a lot of time in being accessible and keeping up with what’s happening, it’s easy to conclude that it all has a certain value, even if what you have done might not be important. This is called rationalization. The New York Review of Books labeled the battle between producers of apps “the new opium wars,” and the paper claims that “marketers have adopted addiction as an explicit commercial strategy.” The only difference is that the pushers aren’t peddling a product that can be smoked in a pipe, but rather is ingested via sugar-coated apps. In 1993, Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge spent fifty days walking solo across Antarctica, becoming the first person to reach the South Pole alone, accompanied only by a radio whose batteries he had removed before setting out. In this book. an astonishing and transformative meditation, Kagge explores the silence around us, the silence within us, and the silence we must create. By recounting his own experiences and discussing the observations of poets, artists, and explorers, Kagge shows us why silence is essentialto sanity and happiness—and how it can open doors to wonder and gratitude.

Reading this you too might find the author's advocating for "full emptiness" and marches off into the wild as "total bullshit". During a walk in the countryside outside of the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, Kagge spoke of the importance of walking "without thinking". That all sounds more easily said than done, I replied. Is it even possible to clear your mind of thoughts? There are messages and hints built in but it’s not a how-to book, rather a meditation on stillness.Words can destroy the atmosphere. They are unsatisfactory. Yes, it is incredible to share grand experiences with others, but talking about it may distance us from what is happening.” How does one achieve silence in the everyday? While Kagge practices meditation, yoga, and going off into nature whenever possible, he also speaks about achieving "silence" while walking Oslo's busy streets or crawling through Manhattan's sewer system. I suppose this is some zen state that an experienced meditator can simply drop into. Or, to say it in a way that makes it sound slightly more achievable, simply comes from being particularly practiced in "tuning out the noise".