Revisit: Personal Silence
As I enjoy the happy silence of an early Sunday morning, I love to think about how the silence is, itself, not so bad. There can be lots of love within silence, for example.
January 4th, 2008 in “Silence Theory”:
This Esquire article got me thinking [again] about the power of personal silence. There’s a gap between what people understand by what you say and what you don’t, especially whether you say anything or not.
In high school, I was a fairly depressed teenager. Typical small-town, too-smart kid with the right classes and the wrong people. I reached a point of bubbling anger that effervesced through the day, preps and jocks in wise avoidance after a few months. I was aggressive in indoor gym, especially with soccer and badminton. If that wasn’t enough to strike fear in the hearts of classmates, my silence usually did it. Nothing can communicate unfriendliness like a refusal to answer a question with a glare that could cut iron. The mystery, though… you felt the mystery of yourself after doing this for some time as what you didn’t say left all the more to your assailant’s imagination. I frightened myself a bit, after some time, as I realized that I didn’t have anything to fill in those empty spaces, either.
On the other hand, you can have the deepest, sweetest communications with those you love without an utterance passing. A total 360 to the same space!
What do you say when you speak? Are you chatty, covering up social discomfort, or filling a space that would otherwise seem too awkward to live within? Do you use silence to strengthen the words you do say? It’s kind of like keeping your word by not upholding promises to it unless it is of dire importance… people will know your actions or words mean business.
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