Pointes and Perspective #54 The Sound Of Silence
The Sound Of Silence
This past week I was listening back to the episode of JAM Joe and Michelle's Dance Podcast when I was their guest last summer. During the conversation, we kept circling back to this idea that students today rarely slow down long enough to become curious. And without curiosity, creativity has a hard time finding its way in.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized this isn’t just true for students. It’s true for us too.
I caught myself thinking about how much I used to read. I used to fill journals constantly. I would sit with my thoughts, underline passages in books, write down observations, dream up ideas, and simply let my mind wander. Somewhere along the way, life became so full that I stopped doing almost all of it. Like so many dance educators, I live in motion - classes, rehearsals, emails, schedules, planning, driving, producing, answering, organizing. Constantly moving.
I laughed when I realized the only times I really create anymore are in the car or in the shower! And how universally true that seems to be for dance teachers. We all say it. “I came up with it while I was driving.” “I thought of it in the shower.” But there’s a reason for that. Those are the rare moments when we are forced to stop multitasking. We can’t answer emails. We can’t run to the next thing. We are simply still for a moment, and suddenly the wheels start turning.
That evening, my partner Mr. Wick and I watched It All Begins With A Song: The Story of the Nashville Songwriter, and I found myself fascinated by the way professional songwriters create. Often, two writers will intentionally lock themselves in a room together for hours. They talk aimlessly, sit in silence, fiddle on instruments, throw out half ideas, stare out the window, wait. They make space for nothing in particular to happen.
And eventually, something does.
A lyric appears. A melody lands. One tiny spark suddenly becomes a song. Creativity slowly wakes up because they allowed room for it to arrive.
It made me think again about our students, especially teenagers, who feel like they need to decide their entire future immediately. They are on this nonstop fast track toward a goal they think they are supposed to have figured out already. One company. One career. One identity. One path. There is so little room left for wandering, changing direction, discovering new interests, or simply sitting with uncertainty for a while.
During the podcast conversation, I said something that I still deeply believe in. You do not have to know what you are going to be when you grow up. Most of us have lived several chapters already, and many more are still coming. But students today are so overscheduled and overstimulated that they rarely get the gift of boredom anymore.They rarely get stillness. They rarely get silence.
And yet, that’s often where creativity begins.
Sure enough, the very next day, I went to my mom and dad’s house and sat outside in their yard listening to the birds, feeling the sun on my face, smelling the Russian olives that were blooming. No agenda. No rushing. No multitasking. I was just sitting there breathing for a moment.
And suddenly, an entire ballet came rushing into my mind.
The title. The storyline. The music. The multimedia elements. The narration. The photography and film components. I could see all of it so clearly. It had been waiting there somewhere beneath all the noise, and the second I became still enough, it found me.
In a world that constantly asks us to rush, decide, achieve, and move onto the next thing, perhaps we need to become a little more willing to pause. To sit still. To wander aimlessly for a moment without needing a result. To let our minds breathe again.
As educators, artists, and human beings, maybe we need to give ourselves, our children, and our students, permission to slow down long enough to wonder. To stop long enough to be curious.
Curiosity and creativity are there, waiting patiently beneath all the noise, for us to find them…
…in the sound of silence.
