Speaking in Silence
In today’s world, it seems like we’re surrounded by a never-ending stream of chatter. But if you listen carefully, you can tune into the quiet moments and hear what the silence really has to say.
As a child I must have heard the phrase ‘silence is golden’ a million times. But why did I have to keep my mouth shut while the grown-ups got to swap jokes, argue politics and gossip about the neighbours? It just seemed a little … self-serving, this silence thing.
By the time I could put stylus to vinyl on the record player, I didn’t care much about what the adults thought. In fact, silent was the last thing I wanted to be. Teenagers like to make noise, be heard, and imprint themselves on the world. But then, settling into middle age, the desire for volume dials down. With age comes an appreciation of the important things in life: good health, strong relationships, nice wine. And that rarest of all things – quiet time.
Silence is not merely the absence of sound. Rather, it is a language all of its own. Becoming fluent in silence, like learning a foreign tongue, reveals a hitherto undiscovered richness in ordinary, everyday things. And here’s the trick to learning silence: focus on what goes before, as well as what comes after. The bookends are its semaphores. See if you recognise some of the silences below:
The pregnant pause.
Which typically follows, “I think I’m late”. Fecund with fears or joy or both, it’s inevitably bookended with tears – which, in this author’s experience, are usually his own. It’s a pause followed by a fast-forward of words, the remote control of conversation suddenly pressed into overdrive.
A silence shared by friends.
Lazily flicking through magazines together, watching a great movie, warming up by a blazing campfire and spying some animal waddling past. It’s the silence that welds a bond in the space between words. It’s that fine wine reserved for special friends, and so all the more savoured.
The punitive silence.
A vocal vacuum that siphons your heart out through your ears. Familiar especially to husbands and boyfriends, wives and girlfriends, it is a stone wall built to make you guess the thoughts of your accuser. This silence screams louder than a jumbo jet, but whatever you do, do not plug your ears. It will only make matters worse.
The silence after making love.
A magical blanket of endless possibilities that embraces you so gently and completely that you’re convinced for a moment in time you are the only two people on Earth. (Or three people, if that’s your deal.) It maintains the experience between the speaker and listener – amplifying it, allowing what was said to be felt and considered, not just wiped away with more words that tend to rob hanging sentences of their importance. This silence forges an empathy of souls – all the more powerful because some experiences are beyond words; indeed, they are most thoroughly discovered in the spaces between them.
The interrogative silence.
Well known to schoolboys brought before the principal, witnesses for the defense, and mortgage applicants. Every last millisecond of this void is a whip’s lash of humiliation. The merest movement, even taking a breath, is a dead giveaway to guilty thoughts. It becomes a game of chicken – the first to speak loses. And when you do speak, because you surely will eventually, not even waterboarding could have made you confess so thoroughly.
The faraway silence.
A familiar foe to anyone in an intimate relationship. A question is left hanging because the listener isn’t really, actually, listening. They are off with their own thoughts – playing a round of golf with them; or replaying, in the privacy of their cerebral cinema, a conversation from earlier in the day, or something that happened at work. Eventually, when the listener’s attention does return, their excuse is something along the lines of, ‘I was just mulling over what you said’. Which, roughly translated, means, ‘What was the question again?’
The silence of reverence offered to souls who are lost on Earth – but still present in mind.
Once a year – pitifully infrequently – for just a minute, we offer respect and thanks, and in a moment of shared quiet we unite through a collective force more powerful than the sum of its parts. We remind ourselves how lucky we are to still be here.
The silence of ignorance.
One with which I am all too well acquainted, this silence has tumbleweeds bouncing through it and crickets chirping. This type of silence is usually preceded by one’s partner asking, “How does my bum look in these jeans?” And the longer I struggle to find descriptive words (I am a writer after all), the greater the chances of being on the receiving end of the punitive silence. You’d think, if only after years of Pavlovian training, I’d just say in reflex, “It looks great!” But that would be disingenuous. I have to locate my glasses, adjust the lighting, ask her to turn around, then flick through my internal thesaurus of all the possible nice things to say about a denimed derrière. Oddly though, that’s never taken into consideration.
But the king of quiet, the most supreme of silences, is the perfect calm of a sleeping child.
It’s a warm hug from Mother Nature congratulating you on a job done well – the storms of crying during the day, the loud tantrums and broccoli refusal have receded into the stillness of the night. Now you melt into your little one’s aura, and that sigh you make is the sound of your heart breaking. While we may snap photos of first steps and birthday cakes and big, beautiful, cheesy smiles – surely all magnificent memories – my favourite image is of our kids tucked up tight, tiny noses and round cheeks resting on a big pillow, dreaming innocent dreams, feeling safe and loved. As I silently watch over them, squeezing their mother’s hand, I know instinctively and with absolute certainty that this will become, at some future time, a nostalgia – a sensory memory that I will quite literally ache for. That this will be my go-to happy place in the years of adolescent arguments and teenage turmoil to come – and so far, it’s worked.
That is the silence I value above all. A golden nugget, unexpected yet fully welcomed, the most precious of quiets. An indelible memory tattooed into my neurons that no amount of future friction can erase. My heart slows and my breath softens even as I think about it now. Maybe that’s why the grown-ups kept on at me about it – it was their voiced reminiscence, a plea for that time again. Silence really is golden – but you have to be able to hear it.