© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 103
I’m in the process of starting a new business. It hasn’t earned anything yet, but it will. It’s another promising shot at the big time. My days are just packed, and I don’t have much time for anything other than work.
Most mornings start before the sun rises. The hour or two that I can squeeze in while the family sleeps are wonderful. Before the family rises, needing this, that and the other, before the phone becomes a demand, not a presence, I can get in a bit of uninterrupted work, and find time for this column.
I never was too comfortable with early mornings. I knew there was a sunrise, but like some kind of vampire, hadn’t seen one for years. The birth of my daughter changed all that. Now I am quite familiar with the way it works. It’s the thing that happens in the east, when the sun comes out from behind the horizon and lights everything up. Sometimes I even go out and look at it for a few minutes.
The thing that all these early morning hours have in common is the absence of people. And this means a lot of productivity for me. Even during the day, when I sit alone in my corner of the house and get the work done, without anyone sharing an office, there is the presence of people.
If it is not the phone, and a new requirement, it is my dog doing her Cujo impression, all teeth, bark and threat, as somebody hurries past the gate trying to avoid her savage accusations. There is always someone around, and always something more to be done.
I recently spent a weekend in the desert, and once again, I was reminded of how noisy people are. Even in their quietest moments, they still bring a major amount of noise to the environment. As I sit here, writing this column, at a time when almost everyone is still asleep, I can hear the distant drone of the first cars.
Soon I will begin hearing the distant alarm clocks from the neighbours’ houses, their voices as they wake up and start hunting for toothbrushes, tea and trousers, and their cars and gates as they make their way to whatever places they go to during the day. But for now, this is as close to the desert as I will come without being there. And then my phone will start ringing.
Notwithstanding the family, even in their quietest moments, people bring noise with them. It’s not just physical noise that they make. There is also the noise that you know will happen. Even before they say something, or ask for something, you know that it will happen and you can hear it in your head.
The problem lies in picking out the voices from amongst the babble that make sense, and whose needs are more important. Obviously family comes first, but what then? The babble of demands for attention makes everything so much more difficult, and obviously everything goes a lot slower.
If you can ignore the heat and the persistent drip of sweat into your eyes, deserts are beautiful places. And its not just the scenery. It’s the focusing silence as well.
If you take a walk through history, a disproportionate number of humanity’s defining moments happen not long after people emerged from deserts. It is as if the silence gave them the ability to think about things and come up with huge new ideas: for instance, ‘what if we were all nice to one another’, or ‘what if everyone believed in this thing’.
And then things start to happen.
Don’t worry though, I only effectively had a single full day in the desert. And my wife and daughter were with me, as was the presence of about a hundred tourists going ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ and ‘look at all the sand’. So I didn’t have the time to come up with an idea that would require us all to alter our beliefs and change the way we lead our lives.
All I came back with was the idea of silence, a renewed appreciation for early mornings and a bunch of sand in my socks.
So life will continue and so will I, though possibly bit more sane and relaxed for now. Normal, slightly cynical offbeat service will be resumed next week, as soon as I can get the seductive idea of peace and quiet out of my head.
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