The sound of silence.

The Many Faces of Silence

Silence. The stony silence. The embarrassing silence. The pensive silence. The ominous silence. The awkward silence. The deafening silence. The pin-drop silence. The silence before a breakthrough. The silence that speaks volume. The silence that drowns all empty chatters. The inviting silence in a sleazy bar. The silence of abuse. The silence that uplifts. The silence of flight. The silence of depth. The silence that pauses. The silence that nudges. The silence that dodges. That pregnant pause. The silence of bated lust. The silence of an orgasmic choke. The silence of a sniper's kill. The silence of muted joy. The silence of neuron firings. The silence of sheer relief. The silence of hope and the silence of dread. The silence before birth and the silence after one’s last breath. The silence that draws out an infinity and the silence in a blink of an eye.

Silence. That culprit of thought. That soundless shame. That look of shock. That word without a name. That name without a word. That soulless void. That vacant stare of horror. That gasp for life. That peril of self-unraveling. That whisperer of truth. That accuser of self. That leavening of remorse. That uncomfortable gap that needs to be filled by noise. That noiseless provocation. That stare of vengeance. That dead calm.

Silence. That ashram of meditation. That evoker of imageries. That darkness before the light. That light at the end of the tunnel. That wormhole of imagination. That flash of creativity. That nurturer of dreams.

Silence. That haven where our pain takes refuge. That wellspring of optimism. That window of wonders. That heave before the winning stroke. That bridge to our unconscious. That place between empty spaces. That cradle of unhurried peace. That imprimatur of contentment. That crossroad of life-changing choices. That meeting of minds. That nick of time.

Silence is all that and more. It has a dark side and a sublime side. It is the fount of knowledge as well as the face of destruction. Silence is the key that unlocks the darkness of our soul and it is also the lock that keeps it all under control.

We cannot bear the drag of pin-drop silence because we are conditioned to embrace noise. We are immersed in a bombardment of sensory overload – all of which clamor for our limited attention. We equate silence with suspicion, fear and loneliness. We run from silence and are drawn towards soulless noise.

But silence compels us to confront ourselves and noise is the excuse we need to hide from it. We grow when we embrace silence but wastes away when we take the fugitive’s path, seeking an escape, a distraction, a quick-fix, a surrogate peace, a mirage of hope.

Silence, like words, communicates. It relates. It interacts within and without. It mediates between our soul and our world. While noise is overrated, silence is underrated. For a pause in time is a gain in perspective. And a gain in perspective is a step forward in time, resolution and closure.

In all this, silence is the pause that God fills in a prayer. And the world of noise cannot exist, or even start to exist, without silence. For silence precedes the creation of time. And in the beginning of it all, it took silence to give birth to noise. It existed in soundless thought before it became a burst of infinite activities. And silence cradles all life-forms directly from the breath of the divine.  For it is written: Be still my soul and know that He is God. Indeed He is, has been and will always be. I humbly stand in awe. I embrace the hushed silence in the shadows of His emerging light. Cheerz.