October 18, 2025

The Art of Quieting.

This isn't happy hour; it’s your sanity!

It’s such a loud world right now.

Not just sound, but mental static, the kind that buzzes in the background of everything: the scrolling, the takes, all of it. We are living in echo chambers so loud that silence has become suspicious, almost threatening.

But I have learned something: when everything is screaming for your attention, the most radical act is to get quiet.

The Restaurant Moment

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in a restaurant, attempting to decompress after the kind of long day that has become far too common. The table next to me was not; it was six people, all talking at once. Each sentence was layered on top of the last. Voices overlapping, laughter crashing against each other, a kind of verbal clamor.

No one was listening.

I remember thinking, if all these people are talking, who’s listening?

Then I realized I was. I was the one having to take it all in. And what I was hearing wasn’t conversation; it was just noise. The noise was an empty and restless cacophony.

In that moment, it affected me deeply. It rattled something in me, PTSD born of time in high-stress, high-alert places. My muscles clenched; my perceptions clarified. It was like the chaos around me somehow reached into a part of me that I’d fought hard to get to calm down.

That’s when I realized: the noise of this world isn’t harmless. It’s exhausting.

For some, it’s even traumatic.

The Discipline of Creative Silence

Silence is too often confused with absence, but it’s closer to the opposite. Its presence without performance.

What I mean by “creative silence” is drawing a soft boundary through which your deeper self can breathe. It’s not withdrawal; it’s recalibration.

When you cease producing for a moment and cease proving, reacting, and defending, you allow creativity to fill the void. The mind unblocks, the heart settles, and the inner voice starts to tell you things.

I’ve come to believe that every worthwhile idea I’ve ever had comes from that quiet place, never from the noise.

Healing in the Quiet

It doesn’t occur when you’re in the business of filling space. It happens after you sit still long enough to notice what hurts and allow it to soften. That’s why I’ve begun guarding silence as a daily discipline:

My Daily Discipline.

• Ten minutes of nothing. No screens, no sound; just breathing and noticing.

• Creating privately. Not every thought or understanding requires an audience. And some ideas are seeds that need to hang out in the ground for a bit.

• Listening with intention. “As soon as I get an impulse to talk, I stop it. The break tends to uncover something below my initial impulse.

• Choosing my environments. I notice the rooms that invigorate me and those that suck my energy. That awareness alone is healing.

The Return

The world is different after a year of silence. The noise is the same; whatever’s out there remains what’s out there. I don’t respond to it anymore; I act on how I want to engage.

Creative silence is not withdrawal; it’s resistance. It’s how we regain clarity in a world that profits from our distraction.

So perhaps you will find a quiet corner the next time you feel crushed under the weight of the world’s chatter. Let the silence work on you. Let it remind you of who you are underneath the clutter.

And I’m wondering, do you feel it too?

The mayhem, the fatigue, the longing for a moment of silence?

Where do you hear your silence in all of this?

SELAH!