What Silence Can Teach Us About Being Loud
By Caitlin Rubin
Silence and noise, when is each appropriate? We live in a time of loud voices surrounding gun control — loud voices for, and loud voices against. We are also in a time of silent voices, the millions of people who see the senseless tragedy, who hear the debate, and yet, caught in the middle of all the angry and loud and confusing voices, say nothing.
There is power in loud voices. But there is also a power in silent ones, in reflection, in thinking on what your voice — capable of becoming loud — might say if it did.
I grew up in a Quaker high school, where every Thursday morning we trudged across the street through the cold and the rain or the distracting sunshine to a small plain building where we’d sit, in complete silence, for one hour. If someone felt moved to speak, they stood and they spoke. If no one felt moved to speak, we sat in silence.
The building is quite unusual for a house of worship in how it is arranged. There is no pulpit, the seats are arranged in rows, with the front rows facing the ones in the back. There is no preacher. The person who speaks is simply the person who feels moved to speak. I heard many different voices through my four years of Quaker meetings. I’ve heard teachers give thoughts on their students; I’ve heard students give thoughts on their teachers. I’ve heard a student choir sing an incredibly moving performance of “My God Is Awesome;” I’ve heard a four-year-old stand to say she likes unicorns.
Each voice was different and yet each voice was received in the same manner, coming from a room of silence, and returning it to that place once finished. There was a respect implicit in this silence that I have not encountered in other places in my life. There was the silence that had gone into the speech, the time the speaker spent sitting in silence, thinking about standing, thinking about what they would say once they had stood. There was the silence that lasted throughout the speech, the silence around the speech, which changed and shaped the airwaves around each and every student and teacher in that room, which enabled them to listen to it, to think about it. And there was the silence that followed, in which the words continued to circulate through the silent building, the words that had not come from a preacher, that had not even come from the front of the room, and yet, were still meaningful, were still important. There was silence in that speech, and it gave that speech the power to be heard.
On March 14th, the day of the nationwide walkout, my old high school led a Walkout For Peace. They had a 17-minute silence in the central quad, one minute for each victim of the Parkland school shooting. I can say from my own experience that moments of silence can be incredibly powerful. They unite a group of people in a way that is universal, that can be understood by all and yet interpreted uniquely by each person. They inspire people to truly think about what it is that matters to them about the issue at hand; they inspire people to say something about it once the time for silence has ended.
I encourage you to engage in this kind of silence — the right kind of silence, the kind that centers, the kind that precedes a loudness of great power because it is imbued with the thoughts and the energy that you built, carefully, in a time of reflection. I encourage you to do this so that when you stand and when you speak, you just might be powerful enough to change that space around you, and with that, to have changed the world.
Caitlin Rubin is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying computer science and cognitive science. She is an avid reader and writer.
