Keep the silence for big moments
How silence marks the occasion by emphasizing the events leading up to it
I was about to sign papers to buy a house with my life’s savings.
We had been renting the house for a decade prior, and the owners now wanted to sell. The weeks and months leading up to this moment were a battle of carefully worded back-and-forths and misunderstandings. From the opening conversations about price, and the conditional clauses, down to who was responsible for the odd electrical wiring of the one geyser. Finding a new home to rent or buy in this seaside town would be arduous for my family of five — Me, my brother, mom and our two golden labradors. We had to fight to keep the status quo.
And then one day, the clauses were all in. The documents looked good, we’d won the timeline we needed for gathering the money, conceded on the fixes and agreed to price and conditions. No more back-and-forths needed. But still, I stood there in my office with the printed pages waiting on the ping pong table for a signature, not being able to move.
I was realising how big this moment was, the next two, five or maybe ten years were waiting for me to sign. And I didn’t know what to do so I took a pause.
Debussy, the famous 19th/20th-century composer of Clair De Lune (and others), has been attributed as remarking,
“Music is the space between the notes” – Claude Debussy.
The silence in music is as powerful as the notes, the character that ties them together into something more than a series of sounds. Without becoming too poetical, my life has been a journey, learning how to product-manage, waking up early to train for the marathon or grinding at a desk to finish writing that technical book. And sometimes resting from those goals. But the rest periods haven’t been well defined. Those silences had been pauses, but not respectful ones.
Let me be very clear… I’m no workaholic I’ve been incredibly lazy at times. A moment of reflection came when I couched so hard, having spent the entire day on it watching TV, that I shrunk my hamstrings and had backache for several days afterwards. That’s just ludicrous. A mental break, sure, but that was about all that’s good about that. That is not a healthy rest or silence.
An overabundance of silence, of space, can be harmful. Avoiding what we know we should be doing by distracting ourselves, a favorite meme of mine reflects this…
When rest becomes atrophy, when we give up our muscles and our strength it ceases to be rest and becomes something horrible and barren. Like the tossing and turning you have after a day filled with frustrations and shortcomings. Compare that to the rest you can have after a day full.
Days filled with sport, finishing that project, long walks, and swimming until you’re out of breath. Sleep from those days is deep and powerful, it doesn’t even ask for permission.
Even writing demands silence after thoughts have been communicated.
It's why we have paragraphs – like this one.
Rest is only part of it. Silence is the space between events, the more momentous the events, the deeper we need to separate them. We give silence to commemorate those who have given their lives for us, in battlefields, in hospitals and in their own special ways, a stadium filled with noisy people, will stop and pause when called for. To explicitly mark the importance of those sacrifices and remind ourselves how they matter.
Buying a house surely ranks as a big decision for anyone, what made me feel it so keenly was that the last eight years of savings were at stake, and I don’t need a house, but my family does. The hesitation I felt in front of that ping pong table could easily be justified, but I had already decided to buy it, so it wasn’t just that. What I wanted was the moment to be something more, a moment of respect. For all the struggles that had led me here.
Without a break in the journey, we forget we’re actually making progress or moving at all. Silence is and can be used as the space between those moments, to show how important the events leading up to it were. To show respect, and to remember it with respect.
I went home to sleep without signing the papers just yet, to give this part of my path one more night. Not to think about it, I spent a normal night with a little music and some TV (with good posture). A moment of silence to mark it with the respect it deserved.
The next day, when I got back into the office I signed the papers and sent them off.
Shout out to Becky Isjwara for awesome feedback and Eric Ho for the Debussy quote.
...dude that sheet music is killer...great read...