By: Trip Jennings

As I write this, the slanted light of late afternoon spills into a nearby room.

Quiet music by a group I’d never heard of before this weekend lilts in my headphones. A person I do not know recommended the duo on TikTok, the Innocence Mission of Lancaster, Penn., and I found the group on Spotify.

This is what I do this time of year. I discover music, books, TV shows and movies, usually by trolling websites populated by taste masters compiling best-of-year lists.

I find joy in this.

Late fall ebbing into winter is my favorite season, a time that is built for introspection. The days shorten, trees shed foliage and life quietens. And I find myself curling into myself like a turtle long exposed to the loudness of spring, summer and early fall.

All my life people have described me as a person with the “gift of gab.” This is because I can talk to anyone, anywhere, a trait my family tries to cure me of every time I start up a conversation with a person on the street of a strange city. People running conferences don’t have to tell me twice to sit with people I don’t know for lunch. I’ve already scoped the room for new conversation partners.

It’s an advantage for a journalist, this predilection for conversation.

A downside of working from home, I’ve discovered, is I am not nearly as entertaining as the curmudgeons, misanthropes and gifted raconteurs one could find at any newspaper newsroom in the country 35 or so years ago.

But it is also true that I like silence. And this is the season when the urge for quiet grows.

My hunt for books, music or films amid the best-of-year lists is always a sign of the coming pull back. My hope is I will find media that burrows deep inside and enables me to pretend that I am a hermit, at least for a moment, freed of the day’s responsibilities and distractions.

One of my fondest memories is of reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s book, The Idiot, in the basement of a library on the campus of Texas Tech university in Lubbock years ago. My wife and I were visiting her family for Thanksgiving. I can’t remember why I had cloistered myself amid the maze of bookshelves. But for several hours I was transported to 19th century Russia and into the head of Prince Myshkin, the main character, as he struggled against the strict hierarchical world that esteemed rank, wealth, and gender over an individual’s character.

I experienced the same out-of-myself-ness a few years ago watching the Japanese film Drive My Car, a quiet, three-hour affair based on a short story by writer Haruki Murakami about a theater director who stages a multilingual production of Chekov’s play Uncle Vanya while he mourns the death of his wife.

Reminiscing about these experiences produces a dull ache. Perhaps it is not only the ache of memory but the pang of a lost life. Of long, languorous days spent reading and lingering amid the wonder of the world — a world lost to most of us with our smartphones and 24/7 news and social media.

As I said, this time of year brings out introspection in me.

Thanks to my career as a journalist, I’ve lived a full and eventful life, witnessing epic violence, notorious grifters, otherworldly beauty and inspiring acts of self-sacrifice. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But in quiet moments the words of Lord Byron, the great poet whose dissolute, hedonistic life was an affront to many of his contemporaries, echo in my head.

“I doubt sometimes whether a quiet and unagitated life would have suited me–yet I sometimes long for it.”

Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut where he reported on many stories, including the resignation and incarceration of Connecticut’s then-governor, John Rowland, and gang warfare in California. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet that produces investigative, data-rich stories with an eye on solutions that can be a catalyst for change.