Choosing Solitude and Simplicity: My Story of Turning Down the Noise and Decluttering My Soul

Simple living is a hot topic lately, both in print and in the echo chamber of the internet. The idea is not so much a new trend as a return- we are grownup children drawn back to the quiet and still and small. We reach for it, but it often eludes us. We long to be still, yet we run from it. We plan for quiet, then we smother it. Many of us are so smitten by the big loud and moving that we overlook the small, never knowing what we missed. You don’t need me to spout off book quotes and statistics to prove that simplicity is a blessing; plenty of excellent books have done that already and I have provided a list below if you want to read them. Neither do I want to add to the noise. Rather I hope to add to your quiet by just telling you my story.

I count it a blessing that I grew up before the smartphone era. My childhood days were filled with daydreams, picture books, colored pencils and imaginary play outdoors unhindered by tech distraction or addiction. Later, these old habits would be like breadcrumbs to guide me back. In my teens, life’s volume turned up with dates and jabber and movies and typical busyness, but I started a spiritual journaling habit that centered me. I sat alone and quiet often, reading the Bible and writing. I didn’t know then how life-giving taking up pen and paper would become.

Still, the world was loud and I listened. Media told me to be pretty in order to be noticed; the church told me to volunteer in order to godly; and culture told me to be busy in order to be important. So, I dolled up and ran from here to there constantly. High expectations of myself added fear into my spinning thoughts- if I didn’t serve enough, I felt guilty and if I didn’t have somewhere to be, it affected my self-esteem. I grew proud of my activity level and associated “solitude” with boredom. When I bought my first smartphone at age 26, “FOMO” and self-promotion online took up space in my already frenzied mind and common tech addiction began to take root. Circumstance, thank God, stopped me from spinning.

We moved. I was half bed-rested for a pregnancy issue in a (beautiful) 100-year-old tiny apartment in a small town during a record Upstate New York winter. I could not work or volunteer and I had nowhere to be and no one to think I was pretty. I was not only bored, I was devastated. But there were breadcrumbs.

I decided that if I couldn’t serve, I could prepare myself for service by reading the Bible for hours a day. I wasn’t looking for peace and rest, I was looking for something to do and proof that I was worthwhile. So I refused to watch television and set my phone aside in order to better myself, by golly. I made tea and read and watched the light slant through my tall Victorian windows. I hadn’t simply watched light since childhood. I journaled pages and pages a day of thoughts and prayers. I drew. I hadn’t drawn much since childhood. I sat silent long thinking, sorting thoughts slow. I worshipped. I grasped that God was just as glorified by me sitting alone in a room as he was by racked up volunteer hours. And I realized that my idol of busyness was just me glorifying myself. I lifted off those burdens and sat quiet and childlike in His presence. Spring came. I watched my elderly neighbor garden and listened to the big oak’s leaves clap in wind gusts. I hadn’t stared at trees and flowers since childhood.

We had another baby and we moved to a little house on the hill where I watched four supermoons rise and discovered the beauty of sunrises. I took my children to the arboretum and to gardens and farms and forest trails where we walked slow and looked closely, like I did when I was a child. I saw the change in myself: less tension and rushing and searching, more rested and gracious and waiting. I hadn’t known such a lifestyle was possible; I was intrigued, so I read some of those popular books I mentioned to learn more.

We moved again. This time to a Bay Area suburb. There were so many cars and all of them in a hurry. I could not see the moonrise from my house, but I grew flowers in our little yard and I drew with my children and filled our mornings with poems and fables and picture books. We hiked California hills most weekends and met friends at parks on weekdays- it was beautiful. We added a Sabbath day to our week. And I stepped away from writing to rest and learn and establish our family culture. My husband and I woke up early to read the Bible and journal in the morning light and I read in bed most nights.

Then I backslid and struggled with bouts of social media addiction, primarily on Instagram. During those stents of overuse I felt highly distractible and foggy-brained, like I couldn’t hold a steady thought or give my children my undivided attention. Or pray. I compared the excitement on a screen to a coral reef in shallow seas- it’s bright, busy, fast and certainly fun to watch. Following a school of yellow fish sweeps my eye by a blue crab beside which I notice a sea star until over it zips a stingray which guides my eye to an urchin and so on. The cycle of feed-scrolling and link-following is just as unending. The internet is brimming with helpful and often lovely ideas. I’m grateful for it. But overstimulation from media deprives us of our ability to dive into metaphorically deeper waters.

I wanted to drink deep: I longed to experience the rich and beautiful thoughts of writers long passed, but my craving for stimulation kept me from immersing myself in a lengthy book. I desired to ponder personal and meaningful ideas in my own placid mind, but that habit of instant gratification hijacked my thoughts. I wanted to meet God, but my own brain would not stay calm long enough to seek Him out. The slow contemplations are like whales. I knew that if I wanted to encounter those mysterious majestic creatures, I must swim out of the zippy shallows into deeper waters. This takes time and work, work that the habit of distraction inhibits. Plus whales move slower- when they do come our way, we watch them approach one fin, fluke and flipper at time. While we wait, there are stretches of nothing but blue and plankton. We must practice stillness before we can handle it. God usually reveals big truths slowly like this. He invites us to wait for them and thus experience growth in wisdom and faith and knowledge and transformative love.

God is abundant. Daily abiding in Him is the center of the Christian life. I saw how the glut of entertainment and activity that is so prevalent, even invasive, in our culture hinders communion with God. These distractions don’t just steal our time, they hold hostage our thoughts, like a glaring light that never turns off. As I sat with God each morning, I watched him remake me. Over time, the habit of quiet slow receiving produced peace, patience and perseverance, in lieu of the old rush and restlessness. No longer was self-improvement my main spiritual goal- it was knowing Him and being known by Him. My daily efforts to switch off the interruptions were changing me. I was decluttering my soul. I thought about God more often and lingered with Him longer. I became readier to see God’s handiwork and sense his presence. I also became readier to really hear my children and peer down into their hungry hearts.

I decided to drop breadcrumbs of quiet habits for my children. To borrow words from Suzanne U. Clark, I wanted to “enlarge their room.” Clark writes in her book, The Roar on the Other Side, “Noise, of course is not a bad thing… But stillness needs a larger room than most of us give it. By making decisions to read a good book instead of watching TV or take a walk inste

ad of playing a video game, you are enlarging this room.” So I followed her advice and Crouch’s and Louv’s advice: I limited their television time, avoided tablets, protected their calendar, read aloud excellent stories and sent them out to play. I watched them pretend together and sit long alone with books or grasshoppers. They dug in the dirt and mimicked birds and built castles out of cardboard. Yes, they ran around screaming too and jumped on the furniture and refused to eat their vegetables. But they never told me they were bored. Likewise, I was never bored. I had rediscovered how much there is to create or read or think about without the pressure of performance or the crutch of entertainment. I had learned to admire the small, to relish stillness and to rest in quiet.

In 2019, we decided to move from the suburbs to three acres in the Ozark foothills. Here, we never took the TV out of the box. I logged off of social media for nine months and counting. I have found that inviting peace into my surroundings helps tame my runaway thoughts. Here, the quiet has been amplified; all the beauty seeps in and eases my mind.

These days, I am still interrupted by beautiful (and wild and messy) children or by dinnertime, but not by an overstuffed calendar or a lengthy list of projects or by dings and pings or by embarrassing wish for a ding. Instead of crouching over my phone on a hunt for stimulation or self-worth, my eyes are drawn out the large window. From the bird-feeder a parting cardinal guides my eyes to swaying black walnut branches from which a nut falls and startles a chicken whose comical run sweeps my gaze to the zinnia patch where bees dart from flower to meadow and beyond to the westward hills.

I didn’t need to move to a plot between woods and a cow pasture to find solitude, but it helps me. Out here, I am in tune with the world and I can move at its natural pace. I watch spiders spin their evening webs while barred owls hoot in the oaks; I walk the meadow path to see the webs mangled and dewy in the morning while dewy cows low. I watch hawks swoop and armadillos root. I shape soft dough with my hands and pause to admire yellow light on my wood floors. Or I dance with my daughter on said floors. I read in my big golden chair and tilt my head up to study the wood grain on the ceiling. I watch my children run or swing or lay sprawled in the yard. Or sit with them on my lap turning illustrated book pages. We stay home three days a week and we invite families over for dinner. We use a computer monitor when we want to watch a family movie. We wake up early in the morning and read in bed at night. And I love it.

This simplicity and solitude is not just surface level- it is sinking into my soul and remolding me. Ten years ago, I would not have expected myself to desire a slow and quiet life spent at home. But I do say it grinning with wide-spreading hand gestures. From my first steps of trimming down the busyness and cutting back on screen time to this most recent step of moving to the hills, I have gradually replaced the inward frenzy with peace, the acceptance of noise with the pursuit of quiet, and all that outward commotion with the still and small and good. Rest has finally become my natural state.

Minister Thomas Kelly (1893-1941) wisely wrote,

Offer your whole selves, utterly and in joyful abandon, in quiet, glad surrender to him who is within… keep contact with the outer world of sense and meanings… but behind the scenes, keep up the life of simple prayer and inward worship. Let inward prayer be your last act before you fall asleep and the first act when you wake.

Here is that promised book list: