There's a Cadence to Silence

It's odd we don’t think it's odd that we regard silence as deficient and not as full. 

We fill the air with banter, music, sports, news and weather updates until we fall exhausted into bed, the sounds of the day still ringing in our heads. Yet we feel unsatisfied because we’ve heard little that we want to remember. In the manner of the Quakers, we should remain silent until we have something important to say.

Words and music have powerful influences on us. If we listen to music throughout the day, it’s no wonder that we’re exhausted. Every song has a specific emotion, so every five minutes we are pulled into a different emotion. After a while, we no longer know what we’re feeling.

If we feel tired, we put on happy music to charge us up, instead of dealing with why we feel tired. Music has become another drug we take to cope with reality.

The sounds of the city shoulder each other out of the way as they fight each other to get our attention. They teach us not to listen.

The music playing in the background of a movie can heighten our experience of it. So much so that we think our walking down the street needs a soundtrack to make it real.

Sometimes when we’re chatting with friends, a word is said that opens the door to something deeper, but the conversation keeps going and the opening slips away. We continue talking about the surface things of life.

It can be unsettling to be home without the sounds of the TV, radio, or music filling the rooms. In the quiet we hear the sounds of the house — the refrigerator clicking on, the house creaking in the wind, a strange hum that comes from an unknown place, and we wonder if something is about to blow up.

When I go camping, it takes a couple of days before I can hear nature’s different, softer voices. It takes time for the surface chatter in my head to quiet. Sitting on the side of a mountain, I begin to hear the thoughts and feelings that are moving underneath my surface.

When I listen to silence, I hear the cadence of the world.

This morning I walked outside and heard the sounds of a creek trickling where I knew there was no water. Listening closer, I realized it was the breeze trickling over the surface of the leaves in the woods, and I felt goose bumps.

In the morning, the flowing waves of light coming from the rising sun wake me with their vibrations of energy.

At night I drink in the quiet of the darkness, and sip the sparkling stars like fine wine.