Silence can be a blessing and a curse depending on perspective. Sometimes we look for silence as a way to decompress or to get away from the noise we work in all day, or the chatty person that just never shuts up, this silence is a welcome respite from making our brain work hard to parse the pieces and not make us go crazy.
The silence I’m referring to is like the stillness that permeates just before an eclipse, everything comes to a literal standstill, nothing moves, and the hot zone gets very quiet and still, no birds singing, no trees swaying, no atmospheric noise whatsoever. We know it’s a phenomenon and as much as we welcome it, we also look for it to be over quickly, so things get back to normal. There’s a piece of us that worries just a little that it won’t. During such a phenom, the animals know something is coming, we hold our breath and talk in hushed tones and when the light shines again, we give a sigh of relief, and a feeling of exhilaration is had by all on the other side of the deafening silence of the eclipse.
This same sort of silence happens between humans, when deep hurt, anger and unhappiness are variables that someone else has made us feel or that events in our life have caused. I call it the human eclipse, where we become silent until we get to the other side (sometimes we do not). Sometimes a relationship is forever ruined, or the person never finds their way out and they stay in the dark and silence, feeling removed and isolated from everyone and everything.
The deafening silence serves as a barrier of sorts. In these times of deafening silence, we create an internal dialogue of what we think the silence is made up of, how it happened and usually we avoid taking ownership of our part in it. We ignore our gut and what we know to be true and perpetuate the silence. As humans this internal dialogue is our built-in “nothing is my fault,” or “nothing is wrong” and eventually because of the faulty dialogue our brain just starts to believe it as truth, after all, in that scenario, silence is golden.
Like the universe, the human brain is vast and can stay on the path of silence or create new pathways of thinking and dialogue that takes us the full breadth of the eclipse where we come out the other side and appreciate the journey.
My two cents are that silence is an indicator of something. Not always bad, but when the light goes out, be sure to think about the dialogue in your head, what you think you know but don’t, what you believe is, but that might not be true, and seek the other side of that eclipse, where the nonsensical dialogue stops, where the truth is raw but necessary and where the lift off the shoulders is real.
My Two Cents of Sense 