Is Silence Silent?

Source: Tim Foster, Unsplash

If silence is silent, is it a resting station or a powerhouse?

When you have a challenge in your life, do you ever use the strategy of silence?

I never thought about silence as a strategy, yet the more I think about it, the more I can see that it is somewhat like the admonition ‘not making a decision is to make a decision.’

When I am working, I need for my environment to be either silent or so full of noise that nothing is able to squeeze into my consciousness. It got me thinking about the nature of silence and its role in our lives. I tell my clients that five minutes a day sitting in silence is important for them as they work to build their resilience. But is this really a quiet time?

I read a lot. While I don’t remember anyone talking about silence as a strategy, I probably just missed or forgot it. Because silence is a remarkable way to find solutions, gain new insights, build support, develop relationships, enhance resilience, and get in touch. It’s a strategy we can choose. We give it many names—meditation, presence, immersion, mindfulness, stillness. I think it is none of these things. Silence is the space—between reading and writing, between listening and understanding, between distraction and presence, between fear and complicity, between surprise and laughter, between acknowledgement and transformation.

Silence is the space where we retreat when we need time. Silence is where we allow our minds to consider possibilities, where we integrate the new into the old, where we give credence to our feelings.

Space for Considering Possibilities

There’s a great blog on the value of daydreaming—that lovely time when our minds are exploring possibilities. Children do it a lot, and adults do it more than they realize. Daydreaming is considered to be wasteful. We learn that unless we are doing something, we’re not doing the right thing (being good). Living in this environment, we seek out things to do. Today, we can always pull out our phone and ‘do something’. What have we lost?

We’ve forgotten how to use inactive time to reflect. Reflection is something that our society has left behind in our rush to succeed. Unlike mindfulness or meditation, where your aim is to cultivate a still mental space, the aim of cultivating reflective silence is to become aware of your thoughts and allow them to make connections or spark insights. There comes a point when the reflection quiets just for a moment, and at that moment, a new insight or idea springs up.

Silence in meetings is considered ‘awkward.’ But we’re the ones who are giving it that interpretation. A good leader learns how to use silence in a meeting, allows for it, even anticipates it and helps participants to anticipate it with acceptance. In these silent moments, one can almost hear the wheels turning as people reflect and consider and see anew. It is anything but silent.

My mind can often move into a very quiet place when I am on the subway. I know I have time until my stop, so I let the busy thoughts in my mind quiet down. The outside environment is anything but quiet, but inside, my mind recognizes that I am no longer chattering. Recognizing the opportunity, it shifts gears and begins to think very differently. The mind begins to sift through memories and facts, making connections that don’t make sense and then with a slight twist, things fall into place and make perfect sense.

Space for Integration

The ability to integrate new thoughts and ideas into what we already know takes time and silence. Consider the impact of never allowing our minds to sift through and organize our thoughts. Sleep deprivation and the resultant loss of dream time are more than physical. Our thoughts become ‘tired’, too.

The need for integration is important in performances as well. Silence in performance is used to allow the audience to imagine, to integrate, to extend what is notsaid. When I watch a movie, I am always impressed when the scriptwriter leaves time for the characters to not say the next line, leaving me to imagine it. When the scriptwriter doesn’t trust me to understand, filling every moment with words, I become bored.

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I went to a concert one time where the performer was playing 12 pieces from Scarlatti. He rapidly moved from one piece to the next without letting his fingers ever leave the keys of the harpsichord. His performance showed amazing dexterity, yet, had he given the audience a short pause between pieces, our minds would have been able to separate the pieces, take each one in, and appreciate the gift from the composer. My mind worked so hard to keep everything in place waiting until I had time to process what I had just heard that at the end of the performance, I was exhausted. I needed some silence.

Facilitators of events use silence (guided and held by the facilitator) to allow for integration. Donna Mac, a communications coach says to end a sentence then “stand [in the power of] silence and give your audience an opportunity to digest your information.” Emma Gonzalez, a student of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, held her audience for 6 minutes and 20 seconds in silence with great strength. Even the audience didn’t understand until she explained her purpose, and then there was a moment of deep appreciation for her action.

Space for Giving Credence to Emotion

Standing before a silent masterpiece – whether by human hands or from Nature’s abundant studio—there is a moment when the mind becomes silent because no words can capture the ‘masterpiece moment’. If you’ll pardon my exuberance, these are moments when my heart sings—no words, no melody, but feelings of exultation fill me. You may say that’s because I have already judged it as one of a kind or better than anything else or done by a famous artist, but that is not the point at all. A true masterpiece is one that touches your heart well before any words can erupt in your mind. Silence keeps the words out of the way as you feel.

Truly earth-shattering events are often met with silence. In 1942, when scientists successfully created a self-sustaining nuclear reaction for the first time, the monumental impact of the event rendered the scientists silent so that this enormity could be absorbed. When man walked on the moon for the first time. There was a moment of silence before the eruption of wonder and joy.

When I first learned of the twin towers, I was struck into a silence that did not allow me to continue a presentation I was in the midst of giving. It wasn’t that it felt inappropriate to immediately return to business. It was that my voice could not speak. When I read about children screaming in the agony of losing their parents, my whole body convulsed in a silent scream.

All were moments that changed the world, and silence allowed us to feel. These are moments when the mind is dealing with the emotion. It is a wordless time filled with fear, awe, repulsion, joy.

Silence and Zero

Language is one of humankind’s great strengths, yet like any strength, it can become a weakness if overused and, in today’s world, perhaps abused. Language always wants to classify, categorize, describe, explain. None of these are needed when viewing a masterpiece, reflecting on possibilities, absorbing new information or sensations, or dealing with feelings.

Silence is like the number zero. Used as a placeholder until more than a thousand years ago when mathematicians in India recognized that zero is a real number and so much more than a placeholder, so much more than nothing.

I’ve concluded that silence is a roaring waterfall. Like zero, silence is not a resting place, but rather a powerhouse.