Silence

Last night I was up late reading this beautiful piece of fiction in which the protagonist was called Silence, and eventually ended up pondering silence itself - about how scared we are of it, about how deafening it can be if we don't know how to recognize its true value.

We are so used to noise that silence has started to mean that you don't have anything valuable to say. People feel the need to fill the gap, and if someone becomes quiet while talking to us we become nervous and start filling the blanks with jargon. I've noticed, especially in a group, that if everyone suddenly becomes silent someone will always begin talking, even if it has nothing to do with the conversation. In fact, in our hurry to fill the silence we start thinking of topics beforehand in our head so that we'll have a fallback plan if the situation comes to that.

We feel that until we call attention to ourselves through our words, we won't have a chance to be noticed or a chance to contribute. This happens the most in interpersonal relationships, with your boyfriend or friend or family member. If they unburden themselves to you and tell you of some problem they might be having, you immediately start thinking of the solution you need to offer and imparting your advice - when maybe sometimes all they really want you to do is listen. To be able to have something 'insightful' to say, sometimes we forget to even listen.

This extends to inner silence as well; we are afraid that if we let our mind achieve stillness, we'll be forced to look into issues that we don't want to deal with. So we fill our head with a million thoughts that continually chase each other resulting in a cacophony of sound... but we forget that a symphony needs rest, patches of silence to accentuate the notes in between to elevate them, to let them shine.

The simple fact is that silence troubles us and we simply don't know how to deal with it (me being one such person).

Strangely enough, it is actually the testament to the strongest of relationships. If you can share silence with someone, it means you are so close that you don't need words to bridge the distance.