Yesterday I took time in the middle of the day to take a long walk on the first properly cold and crisp day of the year. As I walked, I started listening to a novel, and within a few pages a line jumped out at me: the silence was louder than noise
Hearing loss and awareness of silence and of noise
In mid-2016, after several years of doing the highest amount of air travel of my career, I accompanied my youngest son on a trip to represent Cayman on a sports team. As I sat with him on the flight, I realised that I couldn’t hear him very well. When I returned to Cayman, I found out that I had suffered some permanent hearing loss in my left ear, as well as some tinnitus (permanent ringing in the ears).
Since then I have always been very conscious of noise and silence, as well as the fact that this imbalance in my hearing can cause me to suffer sensory over-stimulation when in groups where there is lots of loud conversation. Sometimes I need to plan for such events such that when I get back to my house I can sit in silence for some time to come back into balance at a sensory level. At such times, often I do notice that ringing in the ears much more. The silence becomes louder than the noise was.
Through this hearing loss I have had to become much more aware of noise and silence, also of how people talk (those who mumble I find very difficult to hear, particularly when in a group setting).
Silence and Noise and creating moments of silence in a group setting
I’ve also become more aware than ever before of when there is silence and when people choose to break the silence. Next time you are in a group, try an exercise. Don’t say anything at all for several minutes, simply listen to the conversation and look to assess how often there is a moment of silence and for how long. I predict that the answers will be a) rarely, and b) only for a second or two at a time.
Sometimes to achieve a moment of silence, particularly in a group setting we have to consciously ask for one. When group coaching or facilitating a leadership team meeting, for example, I find that one of the most powerful things one can do is to ask for a period of silence, typically by asking everyone to stop, think, then write something down in response to a prompt.
In such moments, the silence can often be louder than the noise. As I write this, my mind leaps back and around any number of such occasions, remembering the energy in the room in those moments of silence and thought, feeling how everyone is thinking and patiently anticipating what comes forward after the silence is brought to an end and people being to speak.
What happens when we find silence?
Often in social environments we humans seem uncomfortable with silence, we fill the space with our voices constantly. The same can apply to arts such as movies.
What if, though, we became more comfortable with silence. Sometimes that can be very powerful, as with a movie I recently watched, “Drive my Car”, where, in one extended scene the audience suddenly becomes aware that several minutes of background traffic noise on a car journey suddenly turns to silence.
For more on silence, several years ago, in one of the very first daily blogs on this site (in October 2017), I wrote: “What happens when we find silence“, in which I both referenced the book “Silence in the Age of Noise” by Erling Kagge, as well as the astonishing powerful performance art piece by Marina Abramovic called “The Artist is Present”, where she simply sat with and looked at the person who stepped out of the audience to sit opposite her, in complete silence. I recommend watching the video and reading the story in the post, it is truly powerful. Sometimes silence can indeed be louder than noise.
In closing then, let us be aware of the power of silence and when we choose silence over noise.