“The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.” — Rumi
The world is a constant hum of activity and noise. Cars honk, people chatter, phones ping with endless notifications. It’s easy to get lost in the cacophony, to let the noise seep into my bones and rattle my thoughts. But lately, I am working harder on embracing silence.
A way to find peace in the chaos of daily life. Silence can be transformative, and open up new worlds of understanding. Most of us race to fill the mind with thoughts, worries, plans for the future. Why?
This is not a practice that is new to me but one I have let slip away. In those quiet moments, I notice things I’d never paid attention to before. The gentle rustle of leaves outside my window. The rhythmic ticking of the clock on my desk. The steady in and out of my own breath. These small sounds had always been there, hidden beneath layers of noise. Now, when sitting in silence they emerge like whispers, telling their own stories.
I thought of the monks and how their lives are dedicated to silence and contemplation. They moved through their days with a sense of purpose and calm that seemed almost otherworldly. I used to wonder how they could bear the quiet, how they didn’t go mad with boredom or loneliness. It didn’t take me long to understand.
Those monks, I realized, weren’t trying to escape the world. They were learning to listen to it more deeply. In their silence, they were attuning themselves to the subtle vibrations of existence, to the ebb and flow of life itself. Their quiet wasn’t empty; it was filled with a different kind of richness.
As I continued my own exercise with silence, I found myself changing. The constant need for stimulation began to fade. I no longer reached for my phone at every idle moment or felt the urge to fill every silence with chatter. Instead, I learned to sit with the quiet, to let it wash over me and through me.
In this new quietude, I discovered a wellspring of creativity I hadn’t known existed. Ideas bubbled up from some hidden depth, no longer drowned out by the noise of everyday life. I found myself writing more, thinking more clearly, seeing connections I’d missed before.
But it wasn’t just my inner world that expanded. Paradoxically, as I grew quieter, I became more attuned to the people around me. I started to hear the unspoken words in conversations, to sense the emotions behind a friend’s casual remark. It was as if by turning down the volume on my own internal chatter, I could finally hear the world more clearly.
Of course, it’s not always easy. There are days when the silence feels oppressive, when I long for the distraction of noise. And I haven’t become a monk, retreating from the world entirely. But I’ve found a balance, a way to create pockets of quiet in the midst of a noisy life.
In these moments of stillness, I’ve discovered a truth that those monks have known for centuries: the quieter you become, the more you are able to hear. Not just the sounds around you, but the whispers of your own heart, the subtle rhythms of the universe. In the silence, a whole world opens up, waiting to be explored.
And all we have to do is listen.