The Devil is Loud, God is Quiet

I’m back after an extended six-month hiatus from blog-writing. Writing anything “good” is not easy, and I found myself settling for merely meeting the cadence of one post per week, and more often than not, that would mean me sitting down on Sunday evening, tired, to bang out a few close-to-random sentences so I could pat myself on the back for having hit “publish.”

But writing, when done correctly, is a taxing process, one that requires focus and effort. There’s one school of thought that says that as long as the pen (or keyboard) is moving, then you’re doing the thing. My problem with that is that it allows my most inane, repetitive, uninspired, negative thoughts equal footing with my most hard-won wisdom.

I have a voice in my head that wants to remind me of some awkward moment I had in eighth grade. Another wants to nitpick every little thing I did wrong in a past relationship. Another is in the middle of some bizarre fantasy where I’m confronted by a bad guy on a yacht and am forced to deploy some incredible jiu-jitsu in order to save all the models and children on board. These exemplify the quality of thoughts that I have many, many times a day. I doubt they’re worth writing down, and certainly not worth subjecting someone else to. Not only are most of my thoughts self-centered and egotistical, they’re fucking repetitive. I once opened an old journal from years ago and was embarrassed to find my younger self preoccupied with the exact same type of stuff that I was wrestling with in that present moment. It was funny, but also a little depressing. Had I made no real progress in all that time?

One of my favorite ideas from the bible is that God speaks in a “still, small voice.” I love that because it implies that we have work to do if we want to hear whatever the Universe is trying to tell us. It isn’t going to grab us by the chin when we’re distracted by all the colorful bullshit and yank our gaze towards something meaningful and profound. It isn’t going to save us from ourselves. That, I believe, is our job.

Writing is, if nothing else, a disciplined effort to quiet down all the bullshit in one’s mind and discern the voice of whatever creative force put us here. It is, in a way, both mediation and prayer. It’s a supplication, an act that only works when one has appropriately humbled themself. All the loud, repetitive voices we hear, from the inside and the outside, would be easy to write down. They would also be worthless. The Daoist proverb those who say don’t know, and those who know don’t say means that the loudest person in the room is rarely the wisest. The same goes for our thoughts. Because the devil is the loud one; God is quiet.