Put Some Silence into Your Life

Society, for the most part, appears to hate silence. We surround ourselves with noise. Sounds and beeps are all over the place. When is the last time you drove a car with no passengers and didn’t turn on the radio or CD player? We can’t stand it.

If we have noise going then we can avoid having confrontation with ourselves.  Yes, that is what is likely to happen. We will do anything to put noise into our lives including singing horribly out loud to ourselves. Silence is considered one of the great spiritual disciplines and the most avoided one of all.

Consider this quote from Roy Walsh, psychiatry professor quoted in the book The Search for Meaning:

Basically our lives are, to a large extent, spent in avoiding confrontation with ourselves. And then you can begin to make sense of the enormous amount of our culture’s daily activities, which attempt to distract us from ourselves, from deep reflection, from deep thinking, from existential confrontation. There’s a wonderful phrase by the philosopher Kierkegaard, “tranquilization by the trivial.” I think our culture has mastered this better than any culture in history, simply because we have the wealth and means to do so.

What makes silence difficult? People are action oriented and they complement our actions not our being. Think about the last time someone said to you “How are you?’ They want to have noise or conversation as they are afraid of silence.

If we slow down and put silence in our lives it would cause us to listen to ourselves and God. We would rather have a tornado buzzing around in our head as we don’t want to confront the mess we have inside and outside our head. No one can fix that but God.

The answer is simple (isn’t it always?), but undesired by most. We just simply need to add a little silence to our lives. Turn off all the noise, and then listen to the noise inside. I promise if you keep working on finding that inner silence, it will start to come and the peace that passes understanding will also find you too. Silence really is golden.

Let’s start treating like it’s worth what it actually is.

The opinions in this blog are those of Tom Knuppel