Most people treat silence as an absence, a gap where something ought to be, and they fill it as quickly as they possibly can. A pause in a conversation is repaired within two seconds by whoever is quickest. An empty half hour is given something to do. A quiet room gets a sound put into it before anybody has quite noticed reaching for the switch.
But silence is not empty at all. It is the fullest thing there is, and there is something in it that is almost magical, though the word explains nothing and there is no better one. It is silence that holds everything which touches the heart deeply, and why this should be so is not clear to anybody.
What is clear is that nothing important has ever reached anybody while there was noise. Not once. Almost everything that gets understood arrives in a quiet room or on a quiet walk or in the hour when everybody else in the house is asleep.
What is being filled
The speed of the filling is the interesting part. Nobody decides to fill a silence and nobody experiences it as a choice. The reaching happens before any deciding does, which says that something is being avoided rather than something being wanted.
What is being avoided is that in silence a person is returned to themselves. There is nothing else in the room and nothing else to attend to. Whatever they have been carrying has their full attention, because there is no longer anything competing for it, and for a great many people that is the least comfortable place they know of.
So it gets filled, and the filling works extremely well, and thirty years pass in which somebody is never once alone with themselves for more than the length of a shower. Nobody notices this happening because there is no moment at which it happens. It is simply the accumulated result of a very small reflex, exercised several hundred times a day.
The noise inside
There is a second kind of silence and it is much harder to arrange than the first. Every sound in a house can be turned off and a person can still be nowhere near it, because the noise inside their own head can be loud enough that nothing from outside is able to get in at all.
When that happens they go quiet. They do not talk much, and what they do say is brief, and people who do not know them well take this as coldness and are occasionally offended by it. It is not coldness and it is not about them. It is that the volume inside has reached a level where taking in anything more from outside is simply not possible.
Real silence is not the absence of sound. It is the settling of that inner noise, and it cannot be produced by will, which is the difficulty. It arrives on its own if nothing more is added and somebody is willing to wait. The waiting is genuinely unpleasant for the first stretch, which is exactly why so few people ever get past it to find out what is on the other side.
Sharing it
There is one thing many people want for most of their lives and very rarely have, which is to be silent in somebody's company. Not the silence of two people who have nothing left to say to each other, which is a different thing and is uncomfortable for good reason. The other one, where both are entirely present, and nothing needs to be produced by either, and neither feels any obligation to fill it.
Almost nobody can do this. For most people a silence between two people is a problem to be solved, an indication that something has gone wrong or that one of them is displeased, and it must be resolved before it becomes awkward. So a walk together becomes a walk with talking in it, which is perfectly pleasant and is not the thing.
There is something about silence that settles the mind. It makes a person aware of their own breathing, which has been going on unnoticed the whole time, and that alone is calming in a way that cannot be explained to anybody. When the mind simply wants somebody to stop talking, and they do, it is like a conflict quietly ending. That is the closest anybody can get to describing it and it falls well short of what actually happens.
