Silence is not always respected in modern society.

In some college classes, students are expected to contribute their ideas to facilitate tutorial discussions. If you like to take a measured approach towards things, you are dead meat. Your more proactive classmates will fight tooth and nail for their ideas to be heard to secure a good grade. It’s performance art at its best.

The affinity with noise is emphasised in today’s dopamine-fuelled age of social media apps. To make yourself stand out among the throngs of content creators, you got to bring your A game and churn out deliverables for your platforms as reliably as a spider spins its web. Consistency is the key. You got to release updates frequently because it will be out of sight, out of mind otherwise.

Since silence doesn’t yield any tangible outputs, we equate it with the absence of productivity. But it isn’t true that silence equals nothingness. Meditation flavours silence. Focus on your breathing and let your feelings knock on the door of your consciousness. Invite them in and allow them to stay with you for a while. Most likely, they will disappear, having already monopolised your attention for that split second.

Silence is a great tool when we want to respond to an event too. If we follow our gut instinct and try to talk our way through it, most likely we are reacting unwisely to that particular event. We need the self-discipline to rein our half-formed words in and wait for our emotions to saddle down.

So don’t follow the crowd. Be silent to savour your inner voice. That’s a reason why the collocation poignant silence exists. Store silence in your mental toolbox; wield it like a sword to advance.