Can You Live in the Silence?
I was thinking how much I am alone. Ever since I can remember, I have never minded being alone. Not all the time, of course, but I enjoy the silence. Sometimes when I’m working, I listen to my iPod with smooth jazz and the soundtrack to The Theory of Everything, but I sometimes work in silence.
In the silence, I find peace. That’s where we can listen to our thoughts and figure stuff out. If we’re always sending input into our brains, when does it get to rest? And it’s not during sleep, at least for me. I see movies play out in my dreams every night. My brain is working hard when I sleep.
When we shut out the noise, something happens. We get in touch with ourselves. We feel the feelings, whatever they may be. We experience what it means to be alive. Try it. Turn off the radio while driving and just be in the silence. Be in the moment.
Being alone in a quiet place allows us to center ourselves, get balanced, and reflect.
I wonder how many of us don’t do that, given that some folks are okay acting the way they do. Perhaps they never want to hear their thoughts, so they focus on other people and could be harmful. How else can you explain mean, rude, and arrogant people?
It’s sad, really, because I believe that mean people are hurt people. Is it as simple as ‘misery loves company’? I am not sure.
All I know is that when we live in silence, we grow, evolve, and thrive.
It’s not a coincidence that when we’re alone, we can have peaceful thoughts.
Peace starts within us. The way to peace, at least in my experience, is to think better thoughts. There is no other way around it. We can’t will peace to invade our lives, and we can’t pretend we feel peaceful to say we feel peaceful. Peace is found in the silence.
I used to fill my days with so much. I’d cram in things to do in an hour that another person might take a few hours. I was constantly going all the time. If my body wasn’t going, my mind was. I had a job working at a university as an administrative assistant to many professors, handled a writing contest, and helping with a new master’s program. I was doing three jobs, getting paid for one. While I was there, always busy, I had a smile on my face. Classical music played softly in the background. I had everything under control. When I left and got into my car, and was in the silence, I grew sad. I couldn’t stand working there. It went against everything I was, and the pay did not warrant me suffering as I did.
In the silence, I realized I was worth more and left that job.
What I didn’t know then was that I was allowing others to control me.
I stopped writing and put what I had done away in a filing cabinet. It’s still there waiting for my attention.
In the silence, I can see this now. Back there, there was so much noise, even in the silence, and it hurt me. The pain kept me stuck, as it would to anyone.
I never gave up on the silence, though. I kept working through the layers upon layers of painful memories that weighed me down, and through work on myself, I found peace in the silence.
Now, my silence gives me positive affirmations, positive thoughts, and love. It took me a long time to get here, but this is what I had to do to heal. It’s what we all have to do to heal – live in the silence and be okay there.
When we change our thinking, we change our lives. Silence is where we control our thoughts. It’s where we have the power to overwrite past pain with new positive beliefs.
Thank you for reading this, and I hope I offered something good to think about.
To the silence,
Francesca
Written by a human for humans.
© 2025 Francesca M.E.
