The purpose of silence

I periodically seek out long durations of meditative silence. Days, sometimes weeks at time. When I tell people this, they often ask - why?

So here is a meditation, if you will, on the purpose of silence.

To understand silence, we must first understand noise. The following are some sources of noise that we often experience.

1. Sound: living in a big city brings many delights, but comes with a heavy dose of sirens, trash trucks, and yelling. I think a large part why people describe New York City as having a particular ‘energy’ to it, is just how loud it is. Sounds are vibrations of energy, and for me, they cumulate over time and play a role in my mental wellbeing.

2. Digital Noise: a privilege only experienced only by us 21st century humans, our devices and connectivity bring a special type of noise in the form of emails, advertisements, and bird-chirp sounding tweets. Not to mention the new ability to internalize any geopolitical tragedy happening in a land thousands of miles away for which we’ve never visited.

3. Stress of speech: when we have conversations, it creates a mild stress. This is the persistent voice in your head that goes ‘what did they *really* mean when they said that?’ Or ‘was my joke not funny, why didn’t anybody laugh.’ I think this anxiety is universal, and really, it’s quite an important mechanism to keep us socially adept.

Now that we understand noise, it’s easy to understand silence.

*Silence is the absence of noise.*

When we strip away all the stimulus, the activity, the distractions, the demands of daily life, things quickly become clear. Within a few hours, my senses become sharp — exactly like turning the music down to park better.

I hear better and notice more details in my vision. My thoughts become single threaded. Instead of my daily experience of having thoughts fly into my head left, right, and center in erratic succession — they follow a single track — calm and collected.

And then, after a few days like this, decisions become clear. Obvious, even. When I strip away all the noise, what’s left behind is the answer, oftentimes one I knew all along. I just needed the space and the time to realize it.