Wednesday, December 6, 2023

Quiet rooms and small refuges

 Dag Hammarskjöld had a role in the building the headquarters of the United Nations in New York. He was especially interested in what he called The Room of Quiet, a place where people who were making important decisions could sit in silence and think.

Hammarskjöld paid attention to the details. When the room was done, he wrote a pamphlet, The Room of Quiet, published by the UN in 1957. He said:

 

We all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence. This house, dedicated to work and debate in the service of peace, should have one room dedicated to silence in the outward sense and stillness in the inner sense.

 

I have been thinking about small places of relative quiet and refuge in our big, fast, noisy world. The Christian Science Monitor has a lovely essay in the latest edition about how putting rocking chairs in the terminal changed the atmosphere of the airport in Charlotte, N.C.

On a trail at Arabia Mountain, the Wise Woman sat on a bench and put down water for the dog. She noticed the memorial marker on the bench and observed what a lovely gift it was — a small place of refuge for the public, offered by fellow citizens in a moment of grief.

• Note: For more on Hammarskjöld, see “A man who wrote memos to himself,” Nov. 3, 2023.

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