UrbanUpdate

For “Routine Excellence,” GQ asks creative, successful people about the practices, habits, and routines that get them through their day.

Gordon Hempton listens for a living. Only, he’s listening to the sounds that we increasingly can’t hear. An acoustic ecologist, he has spent his life going out into remote areas of nature and recording soundscapes that are vanishing thanks to modern noise pollution. Which is not to suggest that the man nicknamed the “Sound Tracker” is not busy. In addition to the nearly 60 recordings in his Spotify discography, he’s the author of One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Preserve Quiet and founder of Quiet Parks International, which is dedicated to “save quiet for the benefit of all life.” So we wondered: what can the man who has made a career out of silence teach us about working in a world that’s noisier than ever?

GQ: What are your days like?

Gordon Hempton: People imagine me out in the wilderness almost all the time—and I'm glad that they do, cause that's always a happy thought—but ninety percent of my workday is not different from ninety percent of your readers. I'm in front of a computer, juggling emails and text messages. Most of my days remind me of the same mental focus that you have to have being a short-order cook during lunch hour.

Do you have any routines or practices that you engage in every day?

There are two things that I do as a routine practice. One is my to-do list. It's single-spaced, two columns per page. Currently—I just clicked in—it's nine pages. I read this and I refresh my memory about all the balls I have in the air. But I know from experience that a lot of this I only think is important, but actually is not important and could be a waste of time.

So I print it out and try to find a quiet place in nature. As you make the hike in, of course your mind is chattery. Your whole being seems to echo from where you came from. For me, it's Seattle. But you're surrounded by plants and moss and towering trees that attract your full attention and almost make you believe in miracles again. Then, when I'm all quiet, I pull out that list and, and hold a pen in my hand and I go down that list and scratch out everything that I do not need to remember or do, because it's irrelevant to what is truly important.

During the day, I'm also really mindful of how I'm feeling. Am I feeling impaired in my judgment? Am I feeling overworked? Do I need a break? If so, I’ll do some physical exercise, maybe yard work, or a nurturing experience in the garden. Then, because the afternoon’s not as energetic as the morning, I use it for bookkeeping, the little odds and ends of keeping businesses running. Then I get to bed early.

I wake up several times during the night. In Paul Bogard’s book The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, he traces the history of sleep habits of human beings. The nine-to-five workday is very artificial and largely the result of the Industrial Revolution. Some people who have the freedom of choice are up for two hours in the middle of the night. The way that I categorize my nighttime experience, or even a nap that I take during the day, is that time with God is not time wasted. It’s not lost time. Your performance is going to be much better.

Last night I was up for an hour and a half. I just inventoried all the things that I'm grateful for. I listed the various projects I’m working on. I don't have to go into detail. As soon as you start problem-solving in that lucid nighttime experience, you're making a mistake. You can easily get anxious and destroy your sleep. It's a time where you can listen to yourself, listen to your body. Given that I’m about to turn 70, let me tell you, my whole body is filled with aches and pains. So I’ll find some place on me that really feels good. It might be that when I move my ankles, my feet kind of feel nice and relaxed. I focus my attention on that. The other aches disappear. You feel such a great sense of gratitude for your body carrying you through.

Then, when morning comes, I enjoy a slow wake up. I'm not gonna think about work. Work is well organized, so I'm already aware of when my first meeting is, and that's certainly when I have to be back in my office. But the first thing is to continue that reflection on the experiences you had during the night. Remind yourself what life is really about. Nobody on their deathbed wishes they'd spent more time in the office. Start your day that way. I'm drinking one cup of caffeinated coffee, followed by one to two cups of decaffeinated coffee. It’s important not to create your drive artificially.

In terms of coffee? What do you mean?

Yeah, because you need to listen to yourself, your feelings—not your words, but your feelings—as you navigate yourself through the day. You don't want to impair that ability with drugs, and caffeine is a drug. Now, I do have an exception, which is tobacco, in moderation.

Historically, we know it’s commonly used as a sacred substance in moderation, to create a peaceful sense. I'm not embarrassed to say that I often put just a pinch of Copenhagen in my cheek. Just a touch. That's all that it takes. It creates a very peaceful sense in the morning hours, admiring the light of dawn. There is an opportunity at sunrise not just to think about how beautiful the sky is, but also to acknowledge that wildlife are waking too. That this is a global phenomenon, to create that global consciousness. My father was a military man, and he would just be smirking at what I’m saying right now. He was more like, “You gotta set that alarm, get up early and drive hard.” Well, that's more of a fighting against the world mentality. You may be driving hard, but you're not going to be creative and you aren't going to be innovative. You aren't gonna be performing your best.

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To that point, I've read that often you’ll go to a place and, like a painter does with landscapes, you wait for the right soundscape to emerge and sometimes that can take weeks—

Six weeks was the longest.

That’s a lot of time to work and have no concrete output. How does that change how you think about productivity?

I only did that in the early part of my career. I'll never wait six weeks again. But [the thing] about the recording in the field is that I acknowledge that everything that I planned and expected was necessary to do just to get the contract and the project. But now that I'm on location, all of that is forgotten. I'm at the real place. Pay attention to what is really happening. Be present.

How do you deal with the noise of information: news, books, media, emails, all that?

I don't bother watching the news. Here in the United States, it's really infotainment. The spins are so heavy, and usually with an already predetermined opinion about it. So I don't have that distraction. I try to use my devices as little as possible. But for anybody, even if they don't feel like they're digitally addicted, even if they feel like they have everything under control, I strongly recommend that they engage in quiet-seeking travel, that they seek out travel outfits that run tours to quiet destinations in wilderness areas. There, you have an opportunity to revisit what I would describe it as sensory harmony, where your eyes, ears, your nose, sense of touch and taste are all having the same experience. It is no wonder that in our modern lives we cannot make sense of the world, because our senses are constantly arguing.

I’m going down to the Zabalo River in Ecuador soon, and that's my opportunity to make sense of the world once again. As I tell my wife, that Zabalo River Wilderness Quiet Park is my church. When you go to the Amazon, you expect the Amazon to be different. You do not expect home to be different when you return. But it is. The whole world is different. Big changes can happen in your life as a result of making sense of the world. People who have come with me in the past have changed partners, changed jobs. You're convinced you don't want to live someone else's life. That is very powerful. You're no longer imitating. You are original.

For people who can't go to the Amazon or don’t have the time to do a quiet-seeking wilderness trip—if they’re someone who lives in a big city and is overwhelmed in the middle of the week—are there shortcuts to this silence?

When you're busy and tired during the day, and you have another meeting coming up and you can actually feel that your brain is a little hot from the last meeting, this is what I do—I wind up doing it several times a day, and we can do it together right now. It takes five minutes. Acknowledge that you are worth five minutes of your time.

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Take a deep breath, notice how good that feels. If you have a green plant in your room, or you're seated outside, or have a view of anything out your window that’s green, breathe in a feeling of gratitude that the plants of the world are what make oxygen for us. And also when you breathe out, that's what plants use. We may feel disconnected, but you are always connected to nature no matter what.

Next, answer this question: What is the furthest sound you can hear? The longer you take, the further your area of awareness becomes. You just defined your auditory horizon, which is your area of awareness. Now, what is the faintest sound you can hear? For me, it’s the whirl of my computer. That determines your auditory threshold for that particular time that you are in this area of awareness.

Now, what we're going to do is not listen for a sound. We're just going to listen to where we are. Just listen to the whole place all at once and notice how you feel. You can do this exercise indoors, outdoors, urban environments, wilderness areas, and as you do it more often and in different places, you’ll learn that every sound has a feeling, and that some places feel much better than others. But in the process of doing this, your mind has become much clearer. You've become more relaxed, better able to think, to perform, to make choices in your day.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Clay Skipper is a Staff Writer at GQ.XInstagramRelated Stories for GQMental Health