A few years ago, I got it in my head that I wanted to experience the world without speaking, to learn to focus on my inner voice more than my outer and to make certain that I was still truly listening to people, as I was feeling an acute disconnect from those in my life at the time. I attempted, four times, to go an entire day without speaking. I didn’t succeed once.
Growing up, we hear stories of monks and other spiritual devotees who’ve spent decades without uttering a single word, to themselves (which is how I managed to mess it up once) or others. That seems amazing until you take into account that most of them live in secluded cloisters, surrounded only by others who have taken similar vows, or exist in cultures where not speaking is an understood choice. I came to this realization when I came closest to succeeding by spending nearly the entire day inside, alone.
I’m not generally an overly talkative person, though I can be, in the right mood and setting. Even so, it was exceptionally difficult, when listening to someone else, to refrain from replying. Eventually, it broke me down, every time. I couldn’t figure it out. The people with whom I spoke weren’t pleading with me for answers or even for a response. And, while I am exceptionally opinionated, it wasn’t the drive to share my own thoughts that made me break my self-imposed vow of silence. So what was it?
Lying in bed that night, reflecting on that question, Jennifer rolled over in her sleep and tossed her arm over me. Then it hit me (the realization and the arm) that the reason I needed to speak when spoken to was that conversation has become one of the last mediums we possess for genuine human connection, something for which most of us are starved in the age of email and text messaging.
Now, I’m no Luddite. I love technology and the innovations that we keep making are astounding and incredibly exciting to me. Were I granted eternal youth, that’s one of the things that could keep me going through the ages; seeing what comes next. But I think that, as with all things, there is a danger to overuse of such things. While it’s awesome to be able to invite everyone I want to a party with a few clicks of a mouse, or to keep track of and reconnect with old friends via Facebook, I have to wonder at what point it becomes a hindrance to actual social interaction.
As a teacher, I have sat dumbstruck watching two students in a completely social, mostly private setting, text one another across a table for the better part of an hour, never making eye contact or uttering a word to one another then, at the end, when forced to do so, wave and walk off. Don’t get me wrong, if, when I was that age, I’d had the ability to covertly transmit some choice words to friends without the possibility for eavesdropping, you can be I would have, but I could never forego entire conversations for it.
So perhaps, like the monks, we have created a society where silence is the norm rather than the exception. There is a generation of people being brought up now who could happily go a day without uttering a word and still maintain contact with the mercurial melodrama of their everyday lives. When it’s so easy to tune the world out by putting on headphones or losing yourself in the touchscreen of a handheld device, why make the effort to reach out and understand another person?
When I was in high school, I remember having all-night phone conversations regularly, the liberation of walking around the house all afternoon with a cordless phone on my ear, as though my friends were right there with me and I was with them. There were a lot of difficult nights where those voices were all that got me through things that I didn’t think I would make it through. At the risk of sounding my age, I wonder, sometimes, whether the kids growing up these days know what that feels like, or if the loss of that connection is something they would even recognize.
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