On Silence
When your mind is quiet enough, the intuition you've been looking for comes to find you
Silence nurtures our nature, our human nature, and lets us know who we are. Silence can be found, and silence can find you. Silence can be lost and also recovered. But silence can not be imagined, although most people think so. To experience the soul-swelling wonder of silence, you must hear it.
I stop by the chapel on my afternoon walk every day.1
It’s my favorite place, second only to my home, because it’s the only place left in the city that remains untouched by marketing or the influence of people — it’s the only place in the city without noise, literally and figuratively. The chapel is a sanctuary of silence; it’s where I can truly be alone. And I love being alone.
From the silence emerges a calmness, a kind of peace you can feel in your chest and head. When your mind is quiet enough, your heart floats. Then, the answers you look for (about the things you’ve been indecisive about) come to find you. Silence is the act of befriending time: when you sit still, time happily reveals to you what you’ve been searching for, and when you’re quiet enough, time finally tells you what you’ve been waiting to hear.
Silence is not just the absence of noise but the presence of truth.
Silence is also the key ingredient for creativity. In the past, I’ve written about how the finest creations stem from authenticity. However, tapping into your authentic self requires learning to listen to yourself. After all, intuition is the accumulation of experiences making an unconscious judgment about the present, not an outward search of evidence and statistics.
The root of the word “intuition” means something like “to observe with the mind’s eye” and “immediate cognition”. In other words, intuition is recognizing something before you’re able to describe it, like running into an old friend and immediately remembering who they are despite the changes in their face. Intuition is the voice that has always been in touch with what you know. It is pure and remains constant underneath the noise. This is why intuition is the language of silence.
Silence has the power to turn you into a humble wanderer in your own mind. In the landscape between your ears, your soul finds a mirror, reflecting not what you have done but who you are — it’s where you surrender to your intuition, letting that divine whisper steer you through dense forests of doubts and valleys of cynicism.
Silence has taught me the art of listening — not with my ears, but with my being. Silence doesn’t chase, instead, it waits patiently for me to lay aside my worldly cloaks and commune with the eternal. Through silence, I can find a light that does not blind but illuminates; it invites me to shed the superficial layers that distract me from the compassion and will that I’m capable of.
Mr. Rogers once said, “I’m very concerned that our society is much more interested in information than wonder.” Revelations probably swim past us all the time, we just fail to capture them in our relentless quest for the next byte of data or the next notification. The answers we look for are usually not invented but found. Truth never moves; when we feel far away or lost, it is we who have strayed.
Only when we sit still, silence graces us with a wisdom that feels both ancient and profoundly intimate. Only when we learn to listen do we take the first step on our pilgrimage of self-discovery.
If you know where this is, we should hang out.
Interesting. Always felt too that chapels are very underused—they have become monuments, or museums, or relics of the past. People observe them, but don’t use them to their own benefit. Whereas it is the only piece of architecture where the function is precisely to do nothing; nothing of the world’s ordinary affairs. Moreover: to be a refuge from it; to shut it out, and have quietude for thought, rest, reflection, contemplation.
You have a way with words. That was very beautiful