I have forgotten what silence sounds like

I realized recently that I have forgotten what silence sounds like. I do not mean the absence of traffic or the quiet of a library. I mean the total cessation of input. My day begins with an alarm on a phone that immediately offers me a dozen notifications from the world. I brush my teeth while listening to a podcast. I commute with the radio playing to fill the empty air in the car. I sit at my desk and plug myself into a stream of music to drown out the office. I am constantly curating a soundtrack for my existence because the alternative feels unbearable.

We live in an age where the silence has been exiled. We treat it like a problem to be solved or a gap to be filled. If there is a lull in a conversation we rush to speak. If there is a moment of waiting in a line we pull out our screens to scroll. We act as if an unoccupied mind is a dangerous thing. I have begun to wonder what we are running from.

The world is loud. It is not just the decibels of the city or the hum of machinery. It is the noise of opinion. It is the noise of expectation. We are bombarded by the thoughts of millions of other people every single hour. We carry the entire chaotic public square in our pockets. This constant influx acts as a form of anesthesia. It numbs us. It allows us to glide through our days without ever having to confront the uncomfortable reality of our own consciousness.

I think we avoid silence because silence is a mirror.

When the external noise stops the internal noise begins. This is the moment most of us dread. We sit in a quiet room and suddenly we are assaulted by our anxieties and our regrets and our fears. The distraction was keeping them at bay. The noise was the wall we built to keep the monsters out. When the wall comes down we feel exposed. We feel small. We feel the weight of our own existence pressing down on us without the buffer of entertainment.

I have found that staying in that discomfort is necessary. This is where silence becomes a tool rather than a terror.

We need to stop viewing silence as an emptiness. It is a filter. It is a sieve. When we pour the muddy water of our daily lives into the vessel of silence the dirt settles. The water becomes clear. We spend so much of our lives reacting to the stimuli around us that we lose the ability to act. We become mirrors reflecting the world rather than lights shining on it. We repeat opinions we heard on the news. We chase desires that were marketed to us. We live lives that are essentially collages of other people's ideas.

To hear your own voice you must first turn down the volume of the world. This is an act of rebellion. It requires a deliberate decision to disconnect. It requires the courage to sit in a chair and do absolutely nothing. It is in that terrifying boredom that the self begins to speak.

At first the voice is quiet. It is rusty from disuse. It might sound like a stranger. You might hear thoughts that surprise you. You might realize you are unhappy in a job you thought you loved. You might realize you are lonely despite being surrounded by people. You might realize that the ambition you have been chasing belongs to your father or your society and not to you.

This clarity is painful. That is why we prefer the noise. The noise allows us to pretend. The silence forces us to know.

I am learning to cultivate this silence as a daily practice. I am trying to reclaim the authority of my own mind. It is a form of archaeology. I am brushing away the dust of the external world to find the artifacts of my own soul. I have stopped listening to music on my walks. I let the world be what it is. I let my mind wander without a leash.

The goal is not to become a monk or to retreat from society. The goal is to live in the world without being consumed by it. The goal is to carry a center of silence within me that the noise cannot touch. When I can hear my own voice clearly I can navigate the chaos with intention. I can choose which thoughts to entertain and which to discard. I can distinguish between what is urgent and what is important.

We are terrified of being alone with our thoughts because we think we will find emptiness. I am discovering that we find the opposite. We find a fullness that the noise can never provide. We find the only person who can actually guide us through the labyrinth of life. We find ourselves. The world will always be loud. The only way to survive it is to learn to listen to the quiet.