A friend of mine makes a yearly pilgrimage to Lebh Shomea, a retreat center near Corpus Christi where silence is kept. I like the way that sounds. “Silence is kept.” The idea of keeping silence makes it sound like a positive thing that we might seek instead of the absence of sound, which we might try to rectify by turning on a radio or striking up some comforting small talk. At Lebh Shomea, there are only the sounds of nature and the sounds of your own breathing as you labor to decompress from the noise of the modern world. My friend told me that it took him about 48 hours to settle into the environment. After that, the absence of manufactured noise seemed to be the normal state of affairs, while our modern world, with its constant barrage of mechanical sounds, background music, and broadcasted advertisements, seemed strange and oppressive.

I know this process because the same thing happens to us every year when we go to Creede, Colorado. We are high in the mountains there, where you hear birds and wind and thunder and the light rustle of aspen leaves in the wind. There is no television at the house where we stay. As far as I know, there are no radio stations you can pick up with a standard radio. I tried to find a station the first time I went to Creede. I turned the knob from one end of the frequency band to the other but only found static. I haven’t tried since. There might be a radio station now, but I don’t care to find out.

It’s a little unnerving when you first arrive. When darkness falls and there is no television or news, you might find yourself fidgeting a bit. But Jeanene and I have learned to wait patiently until our bodies adjust to the simple sounds and the simpler pace of life. Once you emotionally let go of the modern world and the fast pace of life we’ve created for ourselves there, your body settles quite nicely into what I would say is a more natural state. Before you know it you’ll find yourself happily staring off into the distance, listening to the echoing booms of a thunderstorm, or watching a hummingbird float gently in front of a flower. You might look up to find that you’ve spent an hour trying to feed a cracker to a chipmunk.

Our daughters have not been to Creede as often as we have, and they are not used to the awkward decompression time. The first night we were here, our middle daughter finally grasped the reality of our situation. No television and no internet, which means no MySpace. She panicked.

“Dad, what are we going to do? There’s nothing to watch on TV, and I can’t get to MySpace. What are we supposed to do?”

“Well, that’s why we come here. You have to settle into a simpler kind of living.”

“Yeah, but what are we supposed to DO?”

“You can draw, you can read, you can feed chipmunks, you can go for a walk, you can play cards or dominos, you can - I don’t know - make up stuff to do. Find stuff to do. People used to do that all the time.”

She stared at me in disbelief. “Uh, okay. Or maybe we could just dig our own graves!”

I bit my lip to keep from laughing. “Well, there is a VCR and a television. The TV’s not hooked up to cable or an antenna, so you can’t watch television shows, but I think there might be a couple of movies if you need a little help getting adjusted.”

I opened a cabinet and blew the dust off a couple of VHS movies. “There’s three movies here. West Side Story, Spartacus, and Ben Hur.”

Shelby sat down on the couch and put her face in her hands.

“Oh my God.”

Here’s a parenting tip for you. Your job as a parent is not to remove all pain and discomfort from your children’s lives. You can’t do that even if you tried, because children apparently want to be miserable. They are naturally attracted to boundaries and misery and will seek both doggedly, even if they have parents who are working overtime to prevent their little darlings from suffering for a single moment. ESPECIALLY if they have that kind of parents. This is true of both adolescents and children.

I noticed something about children years ago. If you buy a child a toy, she will enjoy it for an hour or so, then see a different toy that she wants. If you buy her 50 toys, she’ll be happy with them for a few hours, then see a different toy that she wants. Unless you plan on buying every toy your child wants, eventually you’ll have to say no, and the child will be unhappy.

I say, if misery is inevitable, let her be miserable after the one toy and save yourself a lot of time and money.

And here’s a strange irony: the child who was only given one toy will be much less unhappy when you say no than the child who was given 50 toys. You can never buy enough toys to make a child happy, so save yourself the trouble. Provide a few utilitarian toys, let them enjoy their misery for a time, and they’ll get over it.

So when it comes to our vacation time in Creede, we offer the girls a few suggestions of what they might do, but then they are on their own.

We had been here about 48 hours when Jeanene motioned me over to a window, where I saw something that made me smile. The oldest two were sitting in swings on the front porch, one sketching a pine tree and the other reading a book. They hadn’t moved for over an hour. The youngest was down the road playing kickball with some kids she had met.

“I think they’re starting to settle in,” she said to me.

“Yep,” I said. “Give it a little time, and the body remembers what it truly wants and needs.”

rlp

You can barely see our youngest playing kickball in the background

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