...on silence...

She's very good at communicating  She starts to talk and she never stops. Waterfalls cascade from her of information and emotion and I run beside her in one spot to keep up like Alice and the Red queen. I feel like I know everything about her by the end of it and I still want to know more..

But she doesn't always listen. I could wish she listened harder, so she would hear what I was saying, hear what I wasn't saying. But these are the things one requires silence for. Silence is a commodity it is hard to put a price on. It is undervalued and yet is invaluable. For out of silence, out of the small delicate desolate places, comes inspiration and honesty and pain and longing and love.

I hate to be interrupted. It's not that I lose my train of thought. It's that I invariably stop talking when someone else starts and whatever I had to say goes unexpressed. If there was something I had to tell you and you never found out, it's probably because you were trying so hard to talk you forgot to listen to what I was trying to say. And my mind works in roundabout ways. It travels in ellipses. Sometimes it takes me a little while to get there and it requires patience and silence and understanding. I fear to put my thoughts out there for I fear they will be rejected and sometimes that makes me blunt my meaning. Sometimes people take what I say the wrong way. Sometimes I mean them to.

People have all these ideas built in their heads. All these shortcuts. As long as they follow these paths, they don't have to look at experiences that might be new, don't have to take in thoughts that might be different. And we all do it, all the time. We choose to believe that a person is a certain way, because we're that way, because it makes it easier if we just simplify and generalize. And when people tell us we're wrong, we choose to disbelieve them, thinking we know them better than they know themselves. Naivety. Arrogance. Bravado. Simplification. Yet we all do it.

Maybe, if we just listened a little more, we could understand. If we weren't afraid of the silence. if we weren't always looking for a way to fill the empty spaces. If we weren't so scared that no one would hear us that we refused to take the time to hear others.

I don't know why silence disturbs us so much as a species. I just wish we'd get over it.