It was a hot summer afternoon and the merciless rays of the sun were bearing down on a small suburban house in an unremarkable community near the city of Hyderabad. Inside the house, a one sided battle was in progress between a couple who were married for 20 odd years.
The wife was screaming, "What will you do now?"
The husband looked silently at her, then went back to looking at his laptop screen.
"Why don't you say anything?"
"Silence"
"I am asking you what are you planning to do about your job?"
"Silence"
"Does all this mean nothing to you?" She asks gesturing at the house, "We will lose it all!"
"Silence"
"Damn it", she grunted and turning on her heel, and left in a huff slamming the door in her wake.
By the next day, he had earned himself an interview and in a week, a job. While showing her his appointment letter, he asks, "Would you have preferred me arguing with you or getting this done?'
Language is an extremely powerful device and is rightly given credit for all that human society has achieved over the past few millenia. It is what separates us from prehistoric man and beasts, and is said to be the reason for the evolution of the brain along the path that it has taken. However language begets silence just as light begets dark and is an essential part of communication making silence among the most powerful, yet underrated part of communication.
A friend of mine once said, "Human speech is meant to communicate with someone who doesn't understand you completely, not to communicate with someone who does, since that would make it redundant" and yet, the most frequent use of speech is to repeat what is already known to the receiever leaving neither the speaker nor the receiver any more informed of the situation than before.
Communication in such circumstances is used for emotional reasons but is usally counter productive reducing the efficiency of the work being done and causing a build up of stress with no useful output. These emotional outbursts sometimes launch into full scale arguements which serve as a distraction from the work that needs to be done and only cause more problems. Silence on the other hand, allows complete focus on the task at hand and indicates both efficiency and promise.
However, the importance of silence is not limited to just holding back unimportant communication, it is also essential for improving the quality of communication. A speech with no pauses will not leave breathing space for listeners to swallow and assimilate the content. An emotional moment with no time to think and memorize the moment is lost in time. Music cannot be played without playing the pauses effectively. The very working of our hearing needs a certain pauses after a while to prevent the incoming communication from turning into a stream of gibberish.
They form an essential component of public speaking where pauses are used to place emphasis on certain points or for dramatic effect. The effective use of silence is what separates a speaker from an orator. It is the mastery of this form of building suspense that lead to specches like those delivered by Anthony (Julius Caesar), Winston Churchill and Hitler among others
An extended period of silence is far more dangerous to the human brain than an equivalent exposure to loud noise. An experiment involving a person isolated in a soundproof chamber with no sources of sounds on the inside showed the person growing progressively madder and craving some kind of aural stimulation. The phrase "Defeaning Silence" comes from the fact that the development of the human mind occured in the presence of a background noise and was an essential part of his survival instinct, and when that is removed, the brain is unable to process the absolute lack of noise causing blow to the brain that is immense.
The sound of silence is akin to the color of black. Its importance is its lack which emphasises everything around it.
"Silence Saves"
