The Morning the Power Went Out and I Sat With the Quiet

Eight minutes to six. The ceiling fan slowed, slowed again, and stopped, as if someone had pulled the breath out of the room. In the kitchen the fridge quit humming. Its absence sounded louder than the hum ever had.

I'm Quân, thirty-eight, an accountant at a small trucking company. Every morning I wake up between the fan and the fridge without knowing I'm listening to them. It took them going quiet for me to learn they had been there all along.

The first thing I meant to do was feel my way downstairs and find the breaker. The second was to open the neighbourhood Zalo group and check for an outage notice. Both were sensible. But that morning, for a reason I can't explain, I sat down on the edge of the bed and did neither.

Let me say this first: I'm not claiming a power cut is a good time to meditate, and I'm not suggesting you flip your own breaker for some peace. Outages are hot and irritating, and some people need power to keep food cold or to run the machines they work with. All that happened is that one morning the usual noise vanished by itself, and I happened to sit with it for about two minutes. This piece is about those two minutes, and about how to find them again when your house still has electricity.

The first two minutes, with nothing in the house making a sound

The edge of the bed, my feet on tile still cool from the night. The curtain was open a crack and grey light came through it like thinned-out water. I sat with my hands on my thighs and did nothing.

At first the quiet felt like something pressing on my ears. Thick, a little unpleasant. Then, bit by bit, small sounds surfaced. The wall clock in my own bedroom, running for three years and never once heard. A motorbike very far off on the main road. The hinge of a window across the way, one short squeak. And the drip from the kitchen tap, which I hadn't turned off properly the night before, falling into the steel sink one beat at a time. All of it had been there before. The fan had simply covered it.

Every time I'd tried morning meditation, I had concluded my head was too noisy. That morning I saw another possibility, or at least half of one: my head keeps looking for something to hold on to, and for years it had held on to the fan, the television, the notifications. Take the fan away and it turns to the clock. Still holding. The clock is just smaller, so it's easier to see what I'm doing.

Chị Hoa next door, a paper fan in her hand, called across the gap between our two balconies.

— Is your power out too?

— Yes, probably the whole row, chị.

— Then it won't be back till noon. I'm going to buy ice.

I said "yes" and sat back down. It may have been the shortest answer I'd given a neighbour in a month, and strangely it didn't leave me feeling guilty.

Where I almost stood up

Around the second minute, something happened. The back of my neck started to itch with sweat. No fan, and at six in the morning the air was already thick. And in my head two voices began talking to each other, very familiar ones.

— Ten more minutes and I have to shower. The phone isn't charged either.

— Two more minutes.

— What do two minutes get me?

— Nothing. It's just sitting.

The truth is I didn't last two minutes. Maybe a minute and a half. I stood up because my neck itched, not because I was done, and as I stood I felt a small pang of regret, which I hadn't expected. In the kitchen I turned the tap tight, the dripping stopped, and the house went quiet by one more step. I stood there a while, hands still wet.

The trap, I think, is treating two minutes as a test you either pass or fail. I graded myself while I was still sitting, and the grade "a minute and a half, failed" took away nearly all the ease I had left. If I did it again I'd drop the measuring. If it itches, scratch it, then go back to the next sound. Nobody is grading.

The next morning, with the power back

The next day the fan came back as if it had never left. Six o'clock, the same fan, the same fridge, and me, like every morning, reaching for my phone. Then I remembered. I reached over and switched the fan off, meaning to leave it off for two minutes.

It wasn't the same as the day before. The day before, the quiet arrived by itself. Now I had to make it, and I knew I was making it. Some mornings all I heard was myself waiting for two minutes to pass. Some mornings it was too hot and the fan went straight back on. I can't say my mood changed after a few weeks. There's only one small thing: I began to notice when there was background noise around me, and to notice when I was holding on to it.

On rushed mornings these two minutes drop out, like everything else. The piece on rushing every morning and how to meditate anyway covers exactly that, so I won't repeat it. I kept just one habit: sitting up instead of lying down, because with meditating right in bed I tend to fall back asleep.

If your home is never quiet

There are two common reasons this doesn't work. One is that your home really is loud: a busy alley, children, a building site next door, and the quiet never comes. Then don't go looking for it. Pick one steady sound, the fan itself for instance, and listen to it as something to sit beside, not something to get rid of. The piece on when the mind refuses to settle has a few more ways in for those times.

The second reason is harder to say: some people find the quiet makes them feel heavy or uneasy, and things they would rather not meet come floating up on their own. If that's you, stop, open a window, put on music, text someone. Two minutes of silence are not required of anyone, and quiet is not something you owe. If those moments keep coming back over several days and wear you out, telling a person you trust, or someone with professional training, is a perfectly ordinary thing to do.

At half past nine that day the power came back. The fan overhead gave one lurching clunk and began to turn. I watched it for a while, and for the first time I saw it turning.