The Silence Between Notes
Living in a way that makes music instead of noise
The Japanese have a concept called Ma.1 It is a pause in time, an interval or emptiness in space. Ma is considered a prerequisite for growth, like the night hours when the sun does not shine on blooming flowers.
The Japanese character for Ma combines a door and a sun, so that, overlaid, we see a door with sunlight peeking through the crevices. In English, it takes many words to describe what the Japanese can understand in a single character.
Of course we Americans have no language for the space between things. We are born and bred to eliminate the Ma of life, to squeeze profit and productivity out of every in-between space. Americans glorify hustle and noise, bravado and status. Americans glorify taking up all the space in a room, in an hour, on the earth.
Ma has been described as “the silence between the notes which make the music.” Without silence, you have no music—only noise.
We Americans are making so much noise. We are even proud of it.
No surprise, we came up with the job title “content creator.” What matters (to the algorithm, and therefore to the job) is not the verb creation but the noun content, aka more stuff. If you work in marketing, you know content creation has to be fast, trendy, and constant. Quantity over quality.
If you travel to other countries, you inevitably notice the impact of American “content.” Foreign radios play American songs; foreign televisions play American movies. We are churning out entertainment and ads and products for the whole world. It’s what we do.
We are content-rich, but silence- and attention-poor.
The Japanese word for fool is Ma-nuke, which translates literally to “someone missing Ma.” A person unable to leave space between things is a fool.
Ironically, people tend to dismiss the most meaningful things as idealistic. If you tell someone rest or silence or beauty is essential to the human life, they will tell you that is idealism, which is code for “luxury” or “a waste of time.”
If you have ever gotten to a place of true burnout or misery, you know this isn’t true. If you have been truly empty, you know that, in this state, you can no longer afford to dismiss idealism.
Technically speaking, we can endlessly consume; we can work too much; we can hand over every last scrap of our attention; we can hop aboard the train of status and never look back. But there are consequences. Consequences that are no less real just because they are slippery, invisible.
Instead of thinking of idealism as a thing to attain, we can think of it as a direction in which to move. In other words, we keep our eyes on idealism because idealism gives us a goal, a thing we want to work toward. Without idealism, we are lost.
Ma is idealistic. It has also become my very real goal. Today, a regular Monday, I am grocery shopping, cooking dinner for 12 people, preparing for a class, shuttling kids around, going to meetings, and—privately—I am practicing Ma.
If you’d asked me before I lived without a phone for a while, I would have said I already had more silence in my daily life than most people. Easily overstimulated, I actively work to filter out unnecessary noise. I walk through rooms turning down lights and television volume. The sound of the fan on the hood above our oven could drive me to madness.
But the lack of noise after I had no smartphone was something new. I had been using other voices (audiobooks, podcasts, and music) to escape. Without those, I felt bored and stagnant. For a little while, life felt dull and uninteresting.
And there was something else entirely, a surprising paradox: in the exterior silence, I had to face an internal roar.
It was suddenly impossible to ignore that my brain had become very, very loud. It was filled with thoughts, tasks, self-criticisms. It was filled with ideas and opinions, mostly those belonging to other people. It was crammed with questions. Living with my brain was worse than sitting at the dinner table with four kids who all want to tell you about their day at the exact same time someone else is telling you about their day.
I guess I knew my insides were loud, that I’ve always tended toward an overactive stream of inner voices. I ran a ticker tape of tasks, impossibly long. And my attention had been hijacked by infinite scrolling, email ads, autoplay videos, and an algorithm that claimed to love and care about me. But I didn’t have to deal with it when I was moving quickly, adding to the commotion.
Without a “practice of space,” life runs ahead of me. The tasks and needs and questions scatter out from the center. I must manage many pieces of myself, maintaining an impossible level of mental vigilance and always in fight-or-flight mode.
To sit in silence is the only tactic I’ve discovered for bringing all the wayward thoughts back under the umbrella of myself, once again integrating my thoughts with my body and brain. When I am able occasionally to be silent, I feel like a whole person.
When I first gave up my phone and sat in the dead silence of my kitchen or car, I was not experiencing Ma. I was detoxing. But on the other side of detox: Ma.
Beautiful, glorious, time-expanding space.
I grew up a good southern Protestant, skeptical of “pagan” yoga and “eastern” mindfulness. Instead, I was raised on daily “Quiet Times.” But I used those for reading and journaling, not true silence. I used Quiet Times to take in more information, to learn and re-establish myself as the person I already was.
I think it’s my Baptist upbringing that has made me uncomfortable with intentional practices of silence. If an art conference or writing retreat opens with group “breath exercises,” that’s my cue to sneak into the hallway to fill up my water bottle. I’ve responded to invitations of “centering” and “grounding” and silence like Pavlov’s dog, instinctively dismissive of woo. I didn’t believe other cultures (out-groups) had anything to offer mine.
I was wrong.
During my phoneless summer, I worked to quiet the roar inside me. I stopped feeding the stream. I am still new to this kind of silence. I have uncovered it post-burnout, out of necessity. I do a lot of weird things now, like breathing exercises in my car. Like outdoor walks without the goal of burning calories. Like sitting and staring into space. I’m reclaiming the pause.
Ma is negative space. It has been described as “an emptiness full of possibilities, like a promise yet to be fulfilled.” This is exactly the kind of invisible idealism that is so easy to dismiss as unrealistic.
The deep irony, of course, is this: by refusing to “waste time” with pauses, we waste everything else. Resources. Our lives.
It’s October of 2024, so I can’t avoid the political implications. We are glutted on ideas and information and newness. But, between those things we leave no space to determine how they could best be integrated into a meaningful society. It might take us a long time to come up with an equitable, doable immigration policy, for example.
But we detest “dead air,” so we sacrifice wisdom to blather.
I find conversations about politics ultimately unsatisfying. Even if all the policies were perfect and perfectly enacted, something would still be wrong with us as a culture. As long as we’re distracted by the promise of political solutions, we won’t pause long enough to ask the deeper, bigger questions.
Padraig O Tuama says, “Silence is having enough space in yourself to ask yourself strange questions.” Instead of asking ourselves where we stand on policy questions, we could let our questions get a little weirder. What’s worth wanting? How does a good life feel?2 Who will I be if I don’t get what I want?
Inherent in the concept of Ma are the practices of reflection and integration. People trained in it are less reactive, more thoughtful. Supposedly, Japanese business meetings can be uncomfortable because Japanese conversation is so often “full of emptiness.”
In silence we process and appreciate. If there is no space between things, we cannot make out what we are seeing or hearing.
In her book How to Do Nothing, Jenny O’Dell writes, “To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there.”
Okay, but this is not 13th-century Japan. What could Ma look like, practically, in 2024?
Fewer scheduled activities in a day. Working on only one thing at a time. Separating the parts of our lives our technology has blurred together. Refusing to fill unoccupied moments by pulling out our phones. Making things with our hands.
Ma reminds me of the concept of the Sabbath, and it strikes me that both are not “ideas” so much as disciplines. The Sabbath doesn’t come to you; you have to make it. Spaces do not magically appear in otherwise packed lives; you have to make them. In 2024, leaving space is a subversive act. Disciplines require resistance.
In training ourselves to slow down and make less noise, we might make more music.
I learned about Ma in a beautiful book called Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise by Justin Zorn and Leigh Marz.
These questions are suggested in the book A Life Worth Living by Miroslav Volf.
Beautiful. I needed this reminder and although unfamiliar with "Ma," certainly familiar with breathwork and the practice of "being" which I have ignored lately. So, thank you, as always, for your reflection.
Today your piece makes me hold two disparate things: the Japanese word "Ma," which I knew nothing about before reading this excellent essay, and the Greek word "idion." Hannah Arendt: "a life spent in the privacy of 'one’s own' (idion), outside the world of the common, is “idiotic” by definition . . ." (The Human Condition, p. 38). I love how you turn to the political implications of Ma. Words that come from silence are best. Perhaps words that lead to, or even amount to, action are best. I think our professional-class politics has made our own public lives inconceivable. Politics has become nothing better than another source of noise, disassociated from our capacity for silence and action.