The Quiet Between The Drills

“Sometimes we don’t discover stillness by escaping life. We discover it in the middle of it.”

For three months at a time, I wouldn’t see the sky. That surprises most people. When they think of the Navy, they imagine standing on the deck of a ship looking out over the ocean.

Life aboard a ballistic missile submarine was a world of steel. Pipes. Valves. Machinery. Electrical wiring. Narrow passageways connected one compartment to another. Between those compartments were heavy, oval-shaped watertight hatches that admitted only one person at a time. You learned to duck through them almost without thinking. There were no windows. No sunrise. No sunset. No stars. Only the constant hum of machinery and the awareness that somewhere far above us was a world we couldn’t see.

After a while you stopped noticing the smell. You stopped noticing how cramped everything was. What you never stopped noticing was the responsibility. Training. Drills. More training.

Every sailor knew that the sound of a flooding alarm or a fire alarm was something you hoped never to hear. Fire on the surface is terrifying. Fire hundreds of feet beneath the ocean is something altogether different. Life aboard a submarine demanded constant vigilance.

Oddly enough, my favorite watch was the midnight watch. Most people tried to avoid it. I volunteered. Not because it was easy. Because for a few precious hours the pace slowed. The drills stopped. The cleaning stopped. The officers were asleep.

The submarine was still the submarine. Nothing about our surroundings had changed. But something inside the boat became quieter. Sometimes another sailor and I would talk simply to stay awake. The conversations often drifted into complete nonsense. “If the sky were green and the earth were blue, would birds fly upside down?” The questions themselves didn’t matter. The freedom to wonder did. Other nights the conversations became surprisingly philosophical. There is something about the quiet hours that invites people to ask different kinds of questions.

Looking back now, I realize I wasn’t volunteering for the midnight watch because I liked being awake. I was volunteering because, in the middle of one of the busiest and most demanding environments I have ever known, it was one of the few places where my mind could finally breathe.

Years later, when I began meditating, I recognized that feeling immediately. Meditation wasn’t creating something new. It was reminding me of those quiet watches. Not because the world had become silent. Because, for a little while, I had stopped adding to the noise.

One of the great misunderstandings about meditation is that we imagine peace requires perfect conditions. A quiet room. A retreat. A mountaintop. Life has taught me otherwise. Some of the deepest moments of stillness I’ve ever known happened inside a steel cylinder filled with machinery, responsibility, and constant pressure. The stillness wasn’t waiting outside. It was waiting within. Perhaps that’s where it has always been.

“Even beneath the ocean, surrounded by noise, the quiet had been patiently waiting within me.”