Dear Friends,
Summer in our town is characterized by hustle and bustle. I have to admit that I love and hate it. Don’t get me wrong — I love experiencing and witnessing the joy that comes with things like jumping into the salt water, eating a freshly-grown tomato, seeing old friends who only visit in the summer…. But for those of us who have families and also have to work, schedules simply get very full, and it can be exhausting, fun stuff and all.
My wish for all of you who live here — and all of you, in periods of hustle and bustle — is twofold: I hope that you can savor those lively times when a lot is going on and experience them as full and rich. The other side of my wish for you is that you find quiet moments too, when you can let yourself settle. Five minutes of quiet can be surprisingly nourishing.
If you are in Woods Hole and haven’t yet visited the new garden behind the Woods Hole Public Library, I suggest that you do… and just sit. Sit with a cup of coffee, sit with a friend, sit it meditation… just sit for five minutes.
Since I discovered this spot, I have visited it several times, by myself to work at the table or meditate on a chair, and I have also brought my two-and-a-half-year-old son Leif there, who is not the best at sitting, as you might imagine. But I just tell him we are visiting “The Quiet Place” and invite him to check out the plants and rocks and gravel, and he climbs around on the steps and the chairs. We don’t stay long.
I have decided to keep taking him there from time to time, just to remind him — and myself — that Quiet Places are available, even in a busy season. Keep your eye out for them and you may be pleasantly surprised.
I walk around a lot since having a stroller-age child, and I have been noticing lots of Quiet Places tucked into the landscape of our town. Some have been created with intentionality, like the little garden behind the library, and some are accidents of nature or civilization or the interplay of the two. Some are well-cared-for, and some are semi-neglected or mostly overlooked, and I can’t decide which kind I like better.
There are also Quiet Times in Quiet Places, notably the early morning, before all the parking spots along Water Street are taken and there is a line out the door at Coffee Obsession.
I look forward to how much quieter The Quiet Place will be in the winter, when perhaps it will have a layer of snow over it and less traffic noise will waft through. But the noise also isn’t a problem. The beauty of Quiet Places is not their lack of sounds but their placement in the landscape such that we feel tucked away, even just a little bit, when we are sitting there. We must feel protected enough to let our guard down (and we may not have realized that it was up).
This doesn’t mean we have to be particularly far from hustle and bustle. My Quiet Places are often only semi-private, which is sometimes preferable to spaces that are so silent or removed that you feel walled-off from the life around you. You are still part of the fabric of Woods Hole Village when you are sitting at the Quiet Place behind the library. You hear ferry horns, semi-truck engines, motorcycles, and all the rest, but you are just far enough from the main road that you are buffered from the commotion. Just enough (and only if you bring the right mindset).
I hope that by bringing Leif to the Woods Hole Library and other Quiet Places I let him experience a type of quiet that isn’t enforced but rather invited. My hope for him is that he can tolerate quiet when he is older, a skill that seems to be getting lost for many adults, and maybe he will even learn to love it.
Leif may not be able to sit still for very long at this point in his life, and he might not appreciate The Quiet Place quite the way I do, but he seems to like going there. He quickly learned what I was calling it, and I caught him saying it in a cute little video that I posted to Instagram, which you can see here. (While you are there, give me a follow!)
All it is is my asking him where we are, and he says
“The Quiet Place”
When I ask him what we do there, he says,
“Sit.”
I swear I didn’t prompt him to say this. (And how perfect that he then jumps up from sitting!)
Leif is playing with one of his Grandmas right now, so I am going to The Quiet Place to sit. Without him, I will be able to sit for longer, but I don’t need hours there, just a few minutes refreshes me.
I hope you find some some Quiet Places of your own this summer. Or re-visit old favorites. Sit there quietly for just five minutes, and see how you feel afterward.