The mysterious yet clear messages that come from some silence are pure art.
My grandparents answer to a lot of my questions with silence, and I tend to understand the answer better than if any words were spoken.
This is an art I want to master in the future. The calm of silence and the piece of spreading a message with no words is beyond satisfying and way more unequivocal than anything that has ever been said.
The great barrier of language
Language is a communication barrier that (I believe) can be dampened by the use of silence in the right places. Just like anything else, silence has its time and place, and when used in the wrong situations it can be really confusing, frustrating, even infuriating for those listening to it. That is exactly why I consider it such a delicate art, one that requires mastery.
It is even hard to write about this topic. How can I possibly explain in words what can only be said in silence?
(ok so while writing this paragraph, I discovered that there is a book called “The art of silence”. I’ll proceed to write this essay without any type of research on the topic to explore my own personal take on silence with the least amount of new outside information possible)
To me, silence makes people attractive in a weird way. I have never liked those people who are too loud and try too hard to be heard in the crowd, even though I have been that kind of person in some social situations. In a crowded, chaotic room the quiet people tend to be the most interesting ones and also the ones who attract other interesting people. Sure, the handsome guy who talks as if he knew everything will attract a lot of attention and followers, but those are usually just brain-dead people looking for clout and you wouldn’t want to hang out with them anyway.
Dolphins and coral
The thoughts that flow from my mind are way more fluent than the words I can write. Whenever I write, there is a structure I have to follow in order to make it “good writing”, and I’m still far from mastering that structure. However, when I think things just appear in my head in the right order as if by magic it was. Notice how you are thinking right now? You are probably making absolutely no sound.
In fact, humans never needed to make sounds in order to think. Making sounds and giving them all sorts of meanings was just the easiest way to achieve somewhat efficient communication between various entities. But why? Why did we evolve to express our thought in sounds when they are formed in silence? Why did the human brain go through the effort of encoding our silence into words, so that then other brain decodes it back into silence? Wouldn’t it be easier to hear each other’s silences instead?
There is some evidence showing that animals like dolphins and corals might have telepathic abilities or at least a sort of shared consciousness. Why don’t we? Or do we?
“gut feelings”
Some things you just know. You don’t know how you know it, why you know it, or how to express it. Some people call it “gut feelings”, others “intuition”, but I believe that those thoughts are as rational as any other thought, with the only difference being that we lack the right vocabulary to express them even to ourselves.
We think in words, but there is not enough vocabulary to express everything that exists in the universe, every feeling, every object, every action. In fact, we lack a toon of seemingly basic vocabulary. So what happens when we encounter something that there are no words to describe? Do we just not think about it? No! We try to explain it as well as we can, by making analogies and comparisons. Exactly what we do to explain our gut feelings/intuitions.
Chimp heads
It is now safe to say that silence means something. I am tempted to say that silence means, among all the meanings we are aware of, things we don’t yet understand. There is possibly an infinite number of things in the world that we don’t yet understand, so silence can have all of those meanings. There are a number of representations of this idea in popular culture. When people are fascinated, we say they “have no words to describe it”. When people are deeply in love, they describe the moments in silence looking at each other as some of the best moments in the relationship. Someone is yet to define “love” as a whole. Could it be that this silence already holds a definition we simply can’t wrap our chimp head around?
Silence is the ultimate form of communication
Silence might hold all of these meanings, yet it is infinitely simple. Literally anyone can do it. How can something so simple hold so much complexity in its core? We know that simplifying things is challenging, hence the need for mastery:
“I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” — Mark Twain
“Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy” — Isaac Newton
I could literally write down hundreds of quotes praising simplicity here, but you can go ahead a read them yourself.
Online silence
A lot of our communication nowadays is done online. How do we replicate this real-life silence, with all its beauty and simplicity, in a man-made medium that mainly works by written text?
There is probably no way to do it. Just like there is no way of displaying real love online (or at least I don’t think so). But there are ways to display something close love or at least evoke the meaning of it on digital mediums, so there must be something we can do to evoke silence.
The obvious approach would be to not post anything online, but there is a big difference between “silence” and “not saying anything online”: Presence.
When you are silent in real life, you are still there. Your body communicates, your eyes communicate, your movement communicates, your breath communicates. When you post nothing online, you are no longer present. There is nobody, no eyes, no movement, no breath, nothing. Silence is merely a communication method without the aid of sounds or words, not total emptiness.
I have an idea of what the equivalent of silence might look like online. Eric Karjaluoto — @Karj on Twitter — has 4597 followers on Twitter, yet he follows no-one. He does engage in conversations with other users whenever he wants to, but he never sees all of their tweets.
This is counter-intuitive, I know, you might think that he is essentially speaking and not listening to other people. Maybe this is the case, but I interpret it has a form of silence. First of all, he is creating silence in his own head by not letting anyone but himself choose the content he sees. Second, by not following anyone, he gives the impression that he is talking to himself, but publicly. How do you talk to yourself? In silence. He is also not ignoring everyone, he is simply choosing in which conversations he engages and how, just like people who master silence do.
There are numerous articles stating the advantages of unfollowing everyone on social media, but I haven’t made that experiment myself.
Grandparents, again
Back to my grandparents. They, among other older people, seem to master the art of science better than anyone I know. But how do they do it? Or why?
As I am writing this, they are not far from me, so I could interview them. But getting the right answer right away in exploratory themes like this one is not nearly as much fun as searching for it in the corners of my own existence.
I invite you to do the same.
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Follow me on twitter at @jose_goncalves_
