Precious Silence—Part 1

We’ve all heard expressions like “Silence is golden.” And we’ve been exposed to the guidance that listening to others is a gift. (Thoreau: "The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.")

We cannot really listen when we are talking. There’s something special about halting the flow of our chatter and opening our ears and other senses to our world. I believe that silence is beyond golden—it’s precious.

A fascinating attribute of silence is that creativity flows from it. It’s fascinating, partly because it’s also a paradox: something comes from nothing. Out of the void of silence emerges imaginative and original things. (Maybe in a future posting I will explore the parallel between this point and an insight that quantum mechanics brings us: subatomic particles—real things—do slip in and out of existence.)

Creativity is the act of bringing something into existence—something that never existed before. It’s a kind of artistic imagination. It’s bringing the new and unexpected into being—from which change and evolution stem. Creativity is also a renewing process that spawns vitality and innovation. It fosters freshness and helps break the dreary rut we may find ourselves in. Creativity is even a form of healing—in the sense that it is intelligence, which leads to regeneration and healing. Our body, our immune system, must be open to our environment, and this kind of intelligence fosters health and healing.

Language also can be creative. It connects us to others. We relate to each other by symbols, creating a common world in our heads. The cosmos is creative. It is unpredictable, unexpected, and constantly evolving. New qualities are continually emerging—things that could not have been conceived of before.

Creativity is often confused with novelty—but it’s very different; it’s far deeper. Novelty is, by definition, something new, but it’s usually something assembled from existing things. It’s just a rearrangement of stuff that’s already around, into something different. It’s often a repetitive process that can eventually lead to a rut—a copy-cat, frenetic existence that lacks true creativity. It can feed fashions and fads, that become addictive and encourage our grasping for the unattainable, as we try to feed an insatiable hunger. When we fall prey to novelty, we become numb and dull. We close ourselves off to our world—hewing to the fad, becoming rigid and dogmatic.

Continued next time…