Finding Joy in Absence

Take A Pause

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Finding Joy in Absence

Take A Pause Ep 39: Quiet refuge in non-doing

Erin Lee

May 11, 2025

Transcript

While the world urges us toward more - more doing, more consuming, more achieving, mindfulness invites less: less clutter, less busyness, less stimulation, less excess.

There is joy to be found in absence, where fulfilment doesn’t come from adding or accumulating, but from subtracting, simplifying, and creating space for what truly matters.

This kind of happiness isn’t derived from chasing or grasping, but in simply being.

And this joy of absence isn’t far away - it can be experienced in the everyday.

In pockets of silence. In slowing down. In clearing physical clutter and softening mental noise. In pausing judgement. In letting go of rigid beliefs. In abandoning unhealthy patterns.

In meditation, joy emerges from gently relinquishing the need for control, and allowing each moment to simply be as it is.

We can learn to enjoy receiving each moment as it arises, without grasping for it to stay or resisting its fading away.

There is a quiet refuge in this non-doing, an absence that offers a glimpse of true freedom, inspiring us to keep returning, again and again, to the practice of presence.

In this Take A Pause session recorded on 9 March 2025, the TAP community practiced finding joy in absence through attending to sounds, body, and breath. We closed the session by contemplating the poem Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda.

Meditation Begins: 08:03

Reading Begins: 28:00

Meditation Duration: 20 minutes

Keeping Quiet
— Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.