It was just an ordinary visit to the men’s room. For a very ordinary reason. It was a pretty nice restaurant. But I didn’t really expect that moment, that transformational experience.

There I stood at the urinal. Looking at the wall, as one does. And there on the wall… on the wall that so often contains crude drawings and classic limericks reminiscent of days gone by…was a TV monitor. Streaming one of those talk news programs. With the volume turned up.

And in that moment I realized that nearly every place of silence and solitude in our world has disappeared. Gone even from one of the most hallowed of our spaces of refuge… the bathroom.

As I went from place to place, I began to notice: televisions in grocery store lines, at convenience stores, in dining areas… even ‘upscale’ ones. Televisions everywhere.

iPads too… bolted to the middle of your table… so that you have no choice but to engage in the device rather than the person sitting on the other side from you.

Input. Constant stimulation. Everywhere. In every moment. With no means of escape. So that we are compelled to live out our existence in a state of continuous partial attention.

And in that state, we lose touch with the most precious of resources: Silence.

In the silence there is the space to think, the space to reflect, the space to create; the space to consider the core essential questions of our lives: who we want to be, how we want to serve, what we want our legacies to be.

The constant input, the overload of information, our cultural cacophony, has put in jeopardy our capacity to sit still and be still and know the beauty and the grandeur of the here and the now.

Indeed when we walk away from the input, often it induces anxiety… fear… a fear of missing out… a fear of what it might mean to be alone… alone with ourselves.

When I go home to my hillside in Ireland overlooking the sea, the silence in arresting: For a moment I wonder if my ears are broken. Then I soak in the silence. And renew. And revel in what is possible without the noise.

Seek silence. Seek the grace of solitude.

For in the silence is your power.

It was just an ordinary urinal. But an extraordinary moment.

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