“Silence isn’t empty.  It’s where your real clarity waits,” Uriel Maksumov. Silence scares me.  The brain is designed to protect and it is designed to take in input, process it, create understanding, elicit an action or response of some kind.  The brain is designed to move and is constantly trying to solve problems so to find answers in silence seems a bit counterintuitive.  Also, with the elevated frustrations over the last few days, asking for help into what feels like nothingness felt particularly futile. I could see where people feel the emptiness of it.  I mean, I hate having one sided conversations and I’m nervous in silence with others so I will always find something else to talk about.  I hate the awkwardness between topics where you’re trying to figure out what to say—I prefer to keep it going and learn now things.  I’m also an excited talker so when I have an idea I tend to just spit it out—it truly isn’t meant to be rude, I just love sharing ideas. At the same time I’m a proponent of listening to find the answers within and I’ve talked about that many times—but when you start to not hear the answers you’re looking for it can feel like there’s nothing there and the panic sets in so that makes it difficult to find quiet again.

I’ve had those moments of clarity where it felt like lightning striking and everything kind of just fell together as it should.  I’ve had the moments when I felt the tension leave my body because flow took over and I KNEW there was nothing to worry about, all was on track and exactly as it should be.  But I’ve had days when it felt like even opening the door was challenging, where the problems from yesterday were solved but now led to something else that I didn’t see coming.  I heard nothing in those moments.  I felt alone and confused in those moments.  And the truth is there were some of those moments that I never got the answers I was looking for.  Some days the noise is loud and we’re inundated with too much information and advice and talk we don’t need and others, even when we’re asking for help there’s just nothing.  The silence seems louder than anything as we wait to hear something back.  I’ve had to consider in those moments that there just might be something telling us to hold on, to dig deeper, to look at a different side of ourselves to find the answers we seek. Possibly cliché, I know.

We all experience times when we feel we fell short of something.  As suggested, introspection is an important part of finding the truth.  A few things—we are often far harsher on ourselves than anyone else and we think of ourselves far more often than anyone else.  So our opinion and mindset matter most because we spend the most time with ourselves.  We’re used to noise internally and externally and it can become addictive to the point where we can’t handle being quiet or slowing down.  Silence doesn’t have to be a scary thing.  We may not like what we hear but we will always find the truth, especially when we filter out all the noise and unnecessary crap.  We know far more than we give ourselves credit for and need to trust that what we intuit and understand is real.  Silence can lead to the realization that we are with the wrong group of people or that we are exactly where we need to be.  It can show us where we need to grow.  It brings out the things we didn’t want to talk about because it has a chance to surface when nothing else is around.  Face it and embrace it and block out everything else.  To learn more, to get more, to understand more, we need less.