Essays

by Scribes Stories · 4 min read · 1 view

What We Owe to Silence I noticed the discomfort first on a long train journey, somewhere in the second hour, when the man across from me finished a phone call, set down his phone, and immediately, almost reflexively, picked it back up again, not because anything new had arrived to check, but because the silence that followed the call had apparently become unbearable within roughly four seconds of its arrival. I do not say this with any particular judgment, because I recognized the impulse instantly as my own. We have become, most of us, deeply uncomfortable with unfilled space, and I suspect we have lost something significant in that discomfort, something we are only beginning to notice the absence of. Silence used to be a more ordinary companion. Not silence as the absence of sound exactly, but silence as unstructured time, time without a task or a stimulus actively filling it, the kind of quiet stretch that used to exist naturally between activities before every gap became an opportunity for a screen to fill it instead. Waiting rooms. Bus stops. The ten minutes before someone else arrives. These used to be small, unremarkable pockets of nothing, and I think we processed a great deal of ordinary life inside them without ever quite noticing we were doing so. Now those pockets are filled almost automatically, the moment they open, with whatever device happens to be nearest at hand. This is understandable. Unfilled time can feel, especially at first, uncomfortable in a way that is hard to articulate, a low grade restlessness that most available technology is specifically designed to soothe within seconds. But I wonder whether that restlessness, rather than being a problem to solve, might actually be doing something useful that we are interrupting before it has a chance to finish. There is a particular kind of thinking that only seems to happen in genuine quiet, a slower, more associative processing that does not announce itself the way focused, directed thought does. It arrives sideways, often when you are not trying to think about anything in particular. The solution to a problem you had set aside days earlier. A memory that resurfaces with unexpected clarity. The vague shape of a decision you had been avoiding, suddenly a little clearer than it was that morning. I have come to suspect that most of us are quietly starving this kind of thinking, not through any dramatic decision, but through the accumulated effect of never allowing the small gaps in our day to remain empty long enough for it to occur. We fill the gap before the thought has time to surface, and so the thought simply never surfaces, and we go on believing, reasonably enough, that we simply do not have moments like that anymore, when really we have simply stopped leaving room for them. Religious and contemplative traditions across an enormous range of cultures have understood something about this for a very long time, long before any of us needed a term like digital distraction to describe what we were losing. Periods of intentional silence, fasting from noise and stimulation rather than food, appear again and again across traditions that otherwise share very little else in common, which suggests to me that whatever silence provides, it addresses something close to a universal human need rather than a specific cultural preference. I do not think the answer is a dramatic renunciation of technology, which tends to produce more anxiety about the renunciation itself than actual peace. I think the answer is smaller and considerably less demanding than that. Simply leaving a few of the ordinary gaps in your day unfilled, on purpose, and tolerating the initial discomfort of that emptiness long enough to discover what, if anything, rises up to fill it instead. I tried this on a later train journey, deliberately leaving my phone in my bag for the full duration rather than reaching for it during the inevitable lulls. The first twenty minutes were, I will admit, mildly unpleasant, a restlessness I had clearly trained myself out of tolerating. But somewhere past that initial discomfort, something quieter took over, and I found myself thinking, without particularly trying to, about a conversation from several weeks earlier that I had not fully processed at the time, turning it over slowly, arriving at an understanding of it I had not managed to reach in all the busier, more filled weeks since it happened. I do not think that understanding would have arrived if I had filled the gap the way I usually do. It needed the emptiness first, the way certain plants apparently need a period of darkness before they will flower, and I wonder how much of that quiet, necessary processing we are collectively missing simply because we have gotten so remarkably efficient at making sure no gap in the day ever goes unfilled. We owe ourselves, I think, a little more tolerance for silence than we currently practice. Not as a discipline to master, exactly, and not as another item to add to an already crowded list of things we are supposedly failing to do correctly, but simply as a small, recoverable habit. A few minutes here and there, left deliberately empty, trusting that something worthwhile might rise up to meet the quiet, if only we can stand to wait for it a little longer than four seconds this time.