The Value of Silence

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Do nothing yet project the hardest argument to refute.  It can be a sign of control, openness or even the decoration of the illiterate – silence.

A wise man once said, it is better to keep quiet and let people think you’re dumb, rather than open your mouth to confirm all doubt.

Perhaps he meant, it has something to do with reason why we have two ears and two eyes but only one mouth – expressed in a cliché, “more talk, more mistakes, less talk, less mistakes.”

Silence can be very powerful, too.  Noisy kids can be reined in by silence on the part of the parents.  Instead of ramming into their sensitive eardrums the words “Be still!” or “Shut up!” parents only need to be still and shut up themselves.  Soon the kids will pay attention.

Have you noticed that some people can be thrown off by abrupt stillness on your part? Not to mention they might have taken your action for great wisdom.

Great things have been hatched in silence.  Leonardo da Vinci sat motionless for days in front of an untouched canvass before he could even start on his Last Supper masterpiece.  The abbot who commissioned him the job, a man without the slightest hint that ideas are born not only in the onrush of conscious effort but also in the quiet, almost subconscious workings of the mind, was greatly displeased.

Silence is a space to grow, a room to move about and have our being.  The canvass is where an artist could let us admire what he already painted with deft brush strokes in his mind.  On the similar level, it could also be true with other artists and writers.

Amidst bedlam and chaos, makes one wonder what would happen if libraries become places where people could just break silence, fragile that it is, into jagged, sharp pieces.  Whoever started the rule that study halls and other places requiring silence should be bastions of quiet has done a great service to humanity.

Everyone needs certain quiet times in a day to go search one’s self and even listen to God’s whispered instructions. 

Someone has said that a key to a moral renaissance may lie in our learning to love silence and in our spending time quietly seeking for the new life, new commitment, and new thoughts which God will give us if we give Him time to maneuver.

That space is silence.   It happens when we don’t move about too much, going to and fro justifying our existence or when we stop murmuring, acquiring, or doing – but just being.

Albert Einstein, a man who must have worked most of the time with a padlocked mouth, became famous because of the formula for his theory of relativity.  He was also successful because of another formula.  He insists, “If A is success in life, I should say the formula is A+X+Y+Z… X being work and Y being play.”

“And what its Z?”

“That,” explains Einstein, “is keeping your mouth shut.”

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