In Search of Silence

by Poorna Bell

  He wasn’t joking about the rapids. They aren’t big, but they require work, and my muscles take on that familiar, sweet rhythm of working through the water. I come across one particular gush of water and, no matter how hard I paddle, it won’t let me through.

  Then, I release my paddle and close my eyes as the current pushes me away. The silence has weight to it, but it is so beautiful and restful. I could sit in the moment for ever, but I know even a few seconds will stay with me in my memory, creating a place of stillness that I can visit over and over again.

  The sensation is that of emotional weightlessness. I don’t think I realised that the noise in my life wasn’t just filled with the sound of other people’s expectations. It was a discordant symphony of so many other pressures: each section was trying to play its own music but was deaf to what the overall harmony should be.

  It was composed of what I expected from my own life, my sadness, my fear that I will never be okay so I have to wield powerful words to pretend I will be okay.

  I am strong. I am capable. I am fine.

  Just because I say a thing doesn’t make it true, however much I want it to be. But that’s a thought and emotion that isn’t required right now. All I feel is the push and flow of water. I don’t need to think. I don’t need to say anything. It is peace at its purest because it requires nothing from me, and I do not require it to be anything. It just is.

  Later on, I get settled into my hostel. ‘You’re in a hostel?!’ Priya texts. She and I are both princesses when it comes to travelling but arguably she is hardier than me since she goes to festivals and doesn’t tend to leave after the first day like I do.

  It came recommended and it’s clean, and by the sea.

  ‘Yes, but I’m not staying in a dorm,’ I reply. Nepal has traumatised me against dorms somewhat – I am just too old and paranoid about my snoring/farting habits to share a room with strangers. Also everyone looks incredibly young, which makes me feel like a weirdo lurking around a school playground.

  I see them scurry around with their houmous, bread and cheap wine, and they are having an amazing time, the first adventure of many.

  Being around them reminds me of a date I went on a couple of months ago, when I was bored in Auckland and tinkering around with dating apps.

  It was with a very handsome Belgian guy named Lucas who was travelling around as a photographer but also wanted to fulfil his lifelong ambition of playing . . . baseball.

  I don’t know whether language was a barrier, but when I tried to ask him questions about his life, he wouldn’t go into any detail. Such as:

  Me: So, baseball? That’s pretty unusual for a Belgian guy, and to come to New Zealand to play?

  Lucas: Yes, I like baseball and this seemed like a good place to come and play it.

  Me: Really? Because, you know, New Zealand is usually known for its rugby?

  Lucas: Is it?

  He liked to have long pauses punctuating the conversation. Long pauses make me very twitchy, so I talk twice as fast to fill the gap. He looked at me like I was on cocaine. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked, which made me even more paranoid and made me talk even faster.

  But then he opened up a bit about his life. He was a few years younger than me, but still in his thirties. He’d been travelling for two years, and his parents were concerned about him not coming back to Belgium.

  Two years might make him sound like some kind of maverick, and, indeed, before planning my big trip, people said to me, ‘Well, you might decide not to come back.’

  But I don’t really get the travelling indefinitely thing. I don’t understand how, at some point, you don’t want your loved ones near you, or at least your friends.

  His idea was to play baseball with various small teams, and then he announced he was writing a book about happiness. But he couldn’t articulate what would be in the book, and I stopped asking questions after he said, ‘It’s a challenge writing it without a laptop.’

  I feel like Lucas’s ‘I’m writing a book on happiness’ line possibly only works on women much younger than him who haven’t written a book.

  When I pushed him on his backpacker lifestyle, he said he stayed in hostels and then started describing how the one he was staying in at the moment was great because they did $3 meals.

  I don’t know if it’s snobbery on my part, but the $3 meals story just made me want to get up and leave. I thought: here is a guy, in his thirties, who doesn’t know what the fuck he is, or who he wants to be. He’s writing a book on happiness but doesn’t have a computer, he plays baseball in a country that is probably least known for its baseball, he’s travelling indefinitely while claiming government benefits from Belgium – and he thinks it’s freedom. Maybe it is freedom to him, but not to me.

  It crystallises something I’ve been struggling with, which is: what is freedom? I’m talking about it from the privileged Western point of view, because obviously in some countries freedom is literally about basic human rights such as women being able to drive or not being bombed. But in our bubble, we have this notion of freedom that if only we weren’t held down by our jobs/loved ones, we’d be free like wild horses and would gallop into the distance.

  But we already know that the brain creates its own prisons (thanks, Srini), no matter how much freedom we may actually have. And I know, for instance, that money allows you freedom but it can also trap you into thinking it’s never enough.

  For Lucas, maybe it’s important that he can roam around playing baseball. But if I was him, being able to afford $3 meals and living off dole money would not be my marker of a good life.

  I start thinking about what a good life would be. For me, it would probably mean a job that didn’t involve managing people. It would mean being somewhere remote and peaceful from time to time, and honouring that regularly. It would be working on the things I love doing but making money from it.

  Money isn’t everything, but it does give you options, I realise. The life of a nomad may seem alluring because it seems free of responsibility, but all you are doing is bringing your basic needs back down to a very primal and fundamental level, for instance needing to be fed.

  There are plenty of people for whom that is not an option, and I wonder what it says about people who can shrug off their life of material privilege for a while and then come back to it as if they never left. I think about my own privilege. When I was in India talking to some friends, they were saying how hard it was to get a visa to Singapore. Singapore! A place I wouldn’t have thought twice about hopping on a plane to visit.

  Then I realised that my British passport meant I could go to so many places and not wonder or care about how tricky it was. Yet I was only granted that because my parents had made the decision to move to the UK, and it seemed completely unfair that people of the same race and family as me were faced with locked doors.

  I wonder how that makes people feel – the ones who cannot move between the doorways of privilege so easily. Pissed off and unfair? My friends didn’t seem pissed off, they just seemed . . . resigned.

  In order to escape the increasingly loud sound of backpackers eating and discussing travel plans, I go and sit by the beach to watch the sun go down.

  An hour before sunset, the sun comes out fully from behind the clouds, brokering peace between sea and sky. The waves arrive in long curls, starting off in a deep-green froth that transforms into pipes of bright-green glass shot through with beams of light as they hit the highest point they can go.

  Just as quickly they dissolve into meek and mild white foam that disappears under the carpet of dark sand to begin the same journey.

  I watch this scene over and over again. I press the corner of my mind like a tongue probing the tender spot of a wobbly tooth, but I can’t find a whisper of those dark shadows that haunted me a couple of weeks ago. I am glad to be alive.

  The next day, I head to Okarito. When I tell my New Zealand family and friends, most of them go, ‘Huh?’ I can understand why. It’s so tiny, i
t’s not on any of the bigger highway boards. It sits between Punakaiki and Franz Josef Glacier, and, of course, everyone wants to get to the impressive glacier, so they just whizz past.

  The only reason I had heard of it was through a random search for kayaking in the area. I discovered Okarito, and read that it had a pretty lagoon.

  Along the way, I stop at the most depressing town I’ve come across to date – Greymouth.

  At first I think I’m being uncharitable – maybe it’s the grey weather. A squall picks up just as I enter the town. Then I think, no.

  The more places I pass through, whether it’s for coffee, lunch or staying the night, the more I sense their personality and feeling. I’m not saying this emanates from the brickwork or concrete – I haven’t totally lost it – but there is a very strong imprint made and left behind by people.

  I first felt it when I went to Stone Town in Zanzibar with Rob. We visited the place where they once held slave auctions, and there was such an oppressiveness to it that I burst out crying. He put his arms around me, and I couldn’t describe it other than a real sense of sadness, despair, so much misery stamped into those walls over and over again.

  I imagine even if you don’t know much about a place, you could still feel it. Greymouth is fucking sad. I don’t know what happened here but it smells like a concentrate of broken dreams and hopelessness. There is a pretty, quaint railway sign, but it’s not fooling anyone. I grab some paracetamol and washing powder from the supermarket and zoom away as quickly as the Kia can go.

  I stop at Hokitika on the way because the pictures I have seen of its gorge are incredible: milky, turquoise water that’s a mix of rock flour and water. It is so beautiful and unearthly, inviting yet so cold – it’s the kind of place you imagine holds the power to eternal youth. But the number of tourists is jarring; its real heart is hidden too deep for me to sense what it is actually like.

  Finally, I end up in Okarito, and it’s an antidote to the tourist masses of Punakaiki and Hokitika. There’s a shonky little sign on the road indicating where it is, and the minute I arrive, I know I am in love with this place. I pop my head into the kayak shop, which has fresh carrot cake on the counter, and walk past a beautiful historical building called Donovan’s Store (it’s not actually a store).

  Down the only main road, called The Strand, there are houses and a little statue that makes up the entire square. It has about thirty residents in total, and if you want to get food or petrol, you have to drive to Franz Josef.

  Ahead, I hear the rumble of the Tasman Sea, and walk towards the shoreline to say hello.

  Behind me rises a vast crop of foliage, the familiar fan of ferns cutting against the swollen sky. Houses perch above the hill in tiny little clumps. There is something special here, and it feels like a place I could live in despite there being nothing here that I’m used to. I’ve never lived in a place without a shop down the road or people about, but the frequency of this place hums to me, and I hum back.

  The silence threads its fingers with the wind, but it isn’t desolate or forgotten.

  Further down the shoreline is a man fishing.

  I wonder how he will cook what he catches. Grill it? Barbecue it? What kind of home does he live in? Is it warm and cosy? Or will it let in the wet, which threatens us with its presence with each passing minute?

  At my feet, the rocks are all different colours, ranging from the purest white to little Dalmatian rocks of black and white. Behind me, wheat-yellow sea grasses toss their hair across the black sand.

  The sea is rough; I imagine here it is always rough as it hits the estuary. Would I be able to live here? I imagine the house I’d live in, the little car I’d buy to go and get groceries. Then I stop. Why do I always do this?

  I imagine myself in a story, but I never imagine the hard parts. I think of the soft woolly jumper but never the relentless cold that requires it; the warmth of tea and biscuits but never the money earned to buy them. My whole life, I have told myself a narrative. If I marry the love of my life, I’ll be happy. If I quit my job and leave my friends and family, I’ll find peace because there won’t be anyone to challenge me. If I don’t have the stress of work, I’ll finally understand myself better.

  The fact is, that silence – true, beautiful silence – isn’t just offering a respite from the noise of urban living. It offers peace, this much is true. A lack of connectivity to a cellphone network if you are lucky. But in the absence of noise, the price it exacts is that of a reflection bowl, and you cannot look away. There is no narrative you can tell yourself that can alter what you see staring back at you.

  There is no story that I can tell myself about moving to Okarito that will fix or remove my sadness. There is no shortcut to honesty, no quick route to inner peace and resilience. Silence is soothing, but it is also utterly searing in what it forces you to confront, which is: who creates your loneliness? Who makes your choices? Who is responsible for your life?

  I believed, with every inch of my heart, that I was in search of silence to figure out what I wanted from my life, free from the expectations of other people. But what I’ve realised is that silence is not just being in the mountains or out on a lagoon.

  Unless I enter into a life of hermitude by buying a jumper, a kayak and moving to a remote shack, I am going to be in situations where that silence must be carried within me. Where I draw so much strength from it that I could be surrounded by a thousand people shouting what they think I should do and, in the midst of all of that, take a deep breath and know myself. Truly know myself.

  I hadn’t realised it, but this whole time I had been building a shell. Like a hermit crab, I had been adding bits of padding to it by not seriously thinking about what I wanted. It was easier to pretend like I didn’t give a shit about love because then I wouldn’t get hurt. It was easier to remove myself from my friends and family because I then didn’t have to think about my future. It was easier to move to a part of London where I didn’t know anybody and I could keep everyone at arm’s length.

  But eventually, what did that future look like? Would it be a life filled with love and mess and sweat where I could occasionally take off when I needed to be alone? Or was it going to be a life filled with the wrong kind of solitude, where the silence wasn’t this nurturing, benign creature, but simply an emptiness, an absence of everything good?

  In order to craft the silence into something good and powerful, I need to think about where I am going, what I want to do.

  What I need is a list. It looks something like this:

  • Sign up to a boxing match.

  • Own a puppy and keep it alive and happy.

  • Live near a river or lake so I can kayak.

  • Go for one hike a year.

  • Get a job that pays enough so I won’t have to worry about money, but not too much that I get trapped by it.

  • Think about adoption.

  • Go on a date with my serious hat on.

  • Figure out what made me think I was going to die (this almost didn’t make the list).

  I don’t think that list includes upping sticks to one of the most remote parts of New Zealand.

  Before I leave Okarito, I head out in a kayak on the lagoon. It’s hard to imagine the lagoon occupies the same geography as the sea, still crashing into the shore as if demanding an answer to its wildness. Here, the water is still, like glass.

  Ahead of me are wetland grasses, yellow fronds melting downwards into orange where they dip into water.

  To my right is the treeline. Although you can hear the distant roar of the sea curled in the edge of your ear, there is none of that bluster here. I paddle away from the jetty and towards a small grove of trees. I’m transfixed: behind them, in the distance, are the Southern Alps, their tips capped in snow.

  The water is so still, so mirror-like, that as I’m heading towards a curve in the lagoon, I cannot tell which is the land and Alps of my world, and which is the world that has just been unlocked in the wat
er’s reflection. If I angled my paddle in the right way, I feel as if I would drift into this alternate universe, where another Poorna waits, leading a different life.

  The sensation of two worlds existing at the same time stays with me. Everywhere I turn and paddle, I see the same smudging of reality. I close my eyes and imagine this other existence. Is she happy? Did she go through the same heartbreak I did? Did she go through worse?

  I drift off to a cluster of grasses at the edge of the lagoon, and just float in the water. I feel my mind reaching for that desperate, illogical place of trying to find Rob.

  Every now and then, I entertain the maddest thoughts that maybe Rob didn’t die.

  Maybe he faked his own death and he’s now happy and peaceful somewhere. Or maybe he did die and is now waiting for me in some parallel dimension, happy and peaceful somewhere. And if I just got to the same place as he was, and talked to him, and told him how much I loved him, how beloved and missed he was, that would somehow fix things.

  But then it passes. The real world elbows its way in, whether it’s through the flutter of spoonbills or the boom of the ocean. It dissolves the dream world; it cleanses me of illusion.

  When I sit in the reality of my life, in a kayak, on the stillest water, with the elegant silhouette of a white heron in the distance, it shows how far I have come. I sought silence for respite from a life I wasn’t sure I wanted to lead, but in turn, it has allowed me to confront the toughness in it. For the first time in a long time, I don’t want to escape my life; I want to actually live it.

  There are things I am sad about, that I will always hold an immense amount of grief around, but there is so much love in my life. I don’t want to leave that behind or let it go.

  I like my life: the safety and the risk-taking, the possibilities and the future-planning; the smallness of the world met with its vastness.

  I like it all.

  11

  THE CICADA’S LAST SONG