Put down your noisemakers and be quieter in 2020
There are good reasons every guru yammers on and on about silence.
The kissing drunks and the glassy-eyed lonely and the broken pot-bellied bartenders and the Instagram-sweet screenagers who never find love in their pile of likes and all the rest of the tired Brooklynites packed into the Atlantic Avenue dive bar all knew that 2020 needed us as much as 2019 did not, and that meant noise, my friends I’ve known and never will, enough noise to break the gutted field of hope we once lined with our educations and wit and grand plans, screeches and whoops and most of all the noisemaker’s squawk of dying goose breath-walking between your ear and mine.
We are here, 2020, we are here, hear us for this moment before we go quiet again beneath the press of money, of striving, of the ash pile memorializing the American dream, of the silence of the planet killed by the mandibles of convenience and power and castle walls.
Quiet again. We are in 2020. We’ve had our noise and there is nothing from that old world to bring into the new. So listen now. Do you hear your breath? Do you hear your thoughts? See them glide by like raindrops down a window? They are telling you: You lack this, get that. You are not this, become that. Be happy, be unhappy—oscillate or you do not exist. And on and on they go, yelling and demanding with only one purpose: to keep stillness at bay.
Quiet. Be still. It is a new time. One of not ownership and not not-ownership. One of not transactions and not not-transactions.
Stillness: The money will not help. We will need each other again.
Hear. You are we. I am us.
Quiet.