My thoughts on Silence.
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It can be blissful, especially after a noisy day. One of my best memories of silence from my days working in school is when the last lesson of the day was in a computer room. Being the last lesson of the day the computers were switched off … it was always a relief, a surprise but a relief, the difference switching off 30 computers made to the ambient noise level.
Another Silence, which isn’t really silent, is walking in the countryside, not talking, no gadgets making noise, just the sounds of nature. Birds calling (let’s be honest here they’re not singing sweet songs, they’re saying things like “My patch, my patch”, trying to get the attention of the females and swearing at trespassers), wind blowing in the trees and rain either pitter pattering or belting down. Hey, I’m from the North of England, we appreciate the rain (most of the time), without it we wouldn’t be such a Green and Pleasant Land 🙂
So far I’ve only mentioned Good Silences, unfortunately not all are good. There is the Silence of shock caused by bad news. May that not come my way again for a very long time (miss you Mo). Silence can be caused by absence, physical or emotional. Physically: that person might no longer be alive; they might be elsewhere on the planet, possibly with poor/no communication facilities (hard to believe at times but even in the UK there are places with no mobile signal!); there could be a physical/medical reason why communication is difficult/impossible.
All of those can hurt but worse, in my opinion, is the Silences with emotional absences at the root of them.
A marriage/partnership where one partner ignores/doesn’t acknowledge the thoughts/feelings/words of the other. (Been there, a marriage that died years before I had the courage to leave.) A friendship that putters away to nothing or implodes, especially hard when you simply don’t know what caused it, these are harder to accept, process and deal with.
Peace be with us all ♥