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Listening to silence
Entry 31 of 36 | show all | print this entry |
I'm learning to understand silence. I will readily admit that it has never been one of my virtues, and I have never been able to fully comprehend its meaning. But there is a time and place for everything.
Firstly, I have had to deal with my own silence. I cannot recall I time when I have talked so little. Sometimes, days on end will pass without being able to strike conversation longer than 3-4 sentences with anyone. I have experienced silence at home too, especially when I was living alone in San Francisco and New York - but even so, I had people to talk to at work all day long, so silence only befell me at night and on weekends, and then it was a welcome change from all the hustle and bustle of my crazy adrenaline filled days at the office.
But this is different. It's silence from the moment you get up to the moment you go to bed. So I am forced to turn to thought instead. Most of the time that is just fine. And besides, discovering a new city as a tourist takes a certain amount of energy, and silence can help you conserve your energy for sightseeing. But sometimes I actually start thinking hard, you know, about the meaning of life and death, about my life and future, about whether I will have - or want - kids, about my family and my country, and so on. And inevitably I start thinking about things I really don't want to think about, and that's when silence starts being a little uncomfortable, even scary. But even so, I can always find another museum to preoccupy my mind for a further few hours and chase those unwanted thoughts away.
I am also learning to understand the silence of others better. Sometimes silence can say what a thousand words cannot. When people have something positive to say, they usually come out and say it straight away - who doesn't like giving pleasure to others? But when the news is bad, we cringe at the thought of hurting another person. We would rather put that moment off for as long as possible. As if time will change something and make the message less painful.
The reality is that the anxiety of silence in itself can be more painful than facing reality. The sooner we know, the sooner we can start the healing process - or dealing with the consequences of the truth. So as optimistic as I am about the human nature otherwise, I am learning to interpet silence as the equivalent of an answer - not the kind I was hoping for. It should be an easy conclusion to reach; for I am sure each person remembers a time when they put off delivering bad news themselves. But we always expect others to act differently, to be better at human relations than ourselves. We hope that the silence of others means something different and are quick to forget - or ignore - what our own silence would mean under the same circumstances.
Does that make us naive by nature? No, it just means that we naturally wish for a positive outcome, and unless we are definitively given a negative answer, as long as there is even a glimmer of hope left of a good outcome - we will continue to hope for it. Sometimes the road to the final answer is littered with signs, and for those few of us who are good at interpreting, the outcome is known far in advance - sometimes even before the person delivering the message knows it themselves. But the majority of us don't see these signs, or find ways of explaining them away. Even in the face of adversity we continue to hope for the best.
There is a fine line between naivite and optimism, as it turns out. I think I would define it like this: if there was never any hope of a positive outcome to begin with, and we convince ourselves that all will be alright in the end, then that is naivite. But if there was hope at some point, even if there no longer is - that is optimism. And even this is quite subective, because who is to say whether hope existed or not? Not only does hope die last - it is also born first, sometimes out of thin air.
So I sit in silence, and contemplate the meaning of silence. But if I listen hard enough, I can hear silence and then it dawns on me that silence is an answer in itself, and that is all I need to be happy and move on. To yet another museum...
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