Are you busy or afraid of silence?

My old friend was talking about vacation ideas and stated that he doesn’t really like the countryside and couldn’t think of hanging out on a silent summer cottage with nothing to do; he’d miss the hustle and bustle of the city. “What do people do there, sit in the garden?” he laughed at the absurdity of the idea.

I was scrolling through a financial chat where a few people were talking about leadership in different countries. One of them was ridiculing Mediterranean countries for their work culture. He thought they weren’t taking work life seriously enough and despised siestas and long lunches with red wine. A nice break in the middle of the day? How obnoxious.

Last year I worked around 7 months out of 12. I can’t count the times someone has asked me “What do you do if you don’t work?”. For anyone who has one or two fully scheduled 10-day-vacations, it might be an unthinkable idea to have so much just pure, silent free time.

What could anyone possibly do with all those empty moments? 

We’re so busy at work and so busy at home. We plan busy holidays just to get back to our busy everyday lives. We’re so proud of ourselves for being so busy, so important, so irreplaceable. 

There’s no room for a moment of silence. We don’t have time to be bored. The world is not ready yet and that report has to be ready by Monday.

In bigger picture, we work away our lives only to arrive to a retirement where we don’t know what to do with ourselves. We’re running towards the paradise but don’t know how to stop when we reach it and end up running right past it.

Are we so busy cause we’re running away from the thoughts that might rise from the silence?

If you haven’t practiced silence and solitude, they’re not easy to be with. You’ll get new, unsettling not-quite-right feelings as the thoughts you’ve been pushing away start to emerge from the dark. You’ll easily end up looking for new ways to push those thought away, you’ll drift around, looking for something to do, a little project you could contribute to. And this is where people get this idea of our integrated need of being useful and working for the community.

Because we don’t know how to be silent, we think we’re meant to talk all the time.

But what if you just stopped to listen for a while?

xx