"What is it about silence that is so unsettling and deeply irksome?" I wonder as I spit out some trite retort to a friend’s comment to avoid having nothing to say.
Silence makes me so anxious that I instinctively fill it with some equally meaningless remark. This is a long-standing reflex of mine, the need to honor someone’s reflection with a response.
Maybe this impulse is a vestige of my years being coached to participate and assert myself; a remnant from the days I was graded on classroom contribution. As long as I can remember, I have believed silence is akin to having nothing of importance to say. Silence is a sanctuary for those without opinions and original thoughts. Silence is for those who did not finish the reading.
But maybe my discomfort with silence is damaging in its own right. I wonder what I have missed out on while worrying about what I have to contribute. I wonder what I would have learned if I allowed myself to reflect on what had been said instead of wondering what was left to add.
This is a profoundly challenging concept to comprehend for a student growing up in an environment obsessed with speed, where being fast is equated to being intelligent.
But lately I have been engaging in a personal experiment to question the value of silence. I have made an effort to listen in order to understand, not in order to formulate a response. I have relieved myself from the pressure of an immediate reaction and allowed myself to embrace and embody this nation’s most feared state: being slow.
As soon as I began allowing room for silence I found I was listening instead of hearing. The questions I asked myself in daily conversation shifted; instead of the perpetual self-reflection — did I sound smart? Did I convey something important? What did I add to the conversation? — I had room to consider what I was being told.
Perhaps the most profound revelation I’ve come across is how silence (and the active listening resulting from such behavior) frees us to question our opinions. Without the burden of having to present my thoughts to prove I have them, and allowing myself time to reflect on and consider what I am hearing, I have been able to meaningfully challenge a lot of my biases.
There is an important distinction between knowing things and having opinions. We all absorb facts; we are surrounded by information from our parents, friends, teachers and books. Often these facts are presented to us packed in personal bias, and growing up we have become predisposed to accept a particular set of these analyses. We see things through a very distinct lens and many of us will go through our lives without this lens ever being questioned.
But taking time for silence, taking time to listen to someone and process a dissimilar perspective before responding, means taking time to question these lenses. I think I posses a great deal of information that does not equate to knowledge. Actual knowledge is how we interpret and analyze the facts we are presented with. However, if we spend too much time caught up in our own ideas, if we are always speaking instead of listening, then we struggle to understand what has been said and we are never forced to confront and challenge our previously cemented positions.
Listening is how we gain knowledge, how we test what we think we know and how we ultimately form our own truly individual views. Thus, to be responsible and informed opinion-holders we owe it to ourselves to embrace silence.
Ultimately, I found that embracing silence did not mean I became mute; in fact, I found I had a lot more to say.
Julia Case-Levine is a freshman from New York, N.Y. She can be reached at juliacc@princeton.edu.
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