I Speak No Longer

One day in the middle of September, I decided to stop speaking.  It was not an idea I just woke up with.  It wasn’t like a decision to go to the mall and get some pancakes.  This was something I had been meaning to do for quite some time now.  And now, I have been at it for quite some time as well.

People have asked me why I suddenly no longer speak, but since I cannot respond, they are mostly left guessing.  A sore throat?  A dare?  A girl?  An accident?

I’d love to explain to them that the point of my Silence is to get over the need to constantly explain myself.

I did have a press-released reason – addressed to my truest friends and family – the day before I started:  “To honor those who I have hurt by speaking too much – especially those who no longer find it in their hearts to speak to me.”

That was the half of it.  The truth was that I had intended this to be one part Self-Flagellation (Retreat) and one part Social Experiment (Exploration).  A long-lost friend of mine called me out for a sinister third part.

“See, silence can be used as emotional blackmail... to get someone on the defensive... to buy you time either to regroup your defences, or plan a better attack... to find your own special wallow-in-misery place inside your head and/or heart...”

In tagalog, she meant to ask “nagtatampo ka lang ba?” (“Is this just a tantrum?”)

Yes.  Touche.  I may have started out that way, and I can admit it now, but as my days of Silence wore on, I stumbled into a pleasant surprise.  I had wandered off to wallow – to gather hate or force amnesia – but found myself in a place where the weight of my misery melted away.  Gone, along with all the foul words I have kept so close and used often for far too long.  Just two days into it, I was already feeling an extremely bearable lightness of being – and I felt like I had discovered the tip of an iceberg.

All three parts faded to the background as a fourth part surfaced:  Did I unwittingly purchase a ticket for a spiritual journey into a world that has been there the whole time, waiting for me to notice it?

Yes, and I notice it more and more each day.  With my mouth shut, other things opened up - eyes, ears, pores, mind, heart... I notice:

I am much nicer to everyone when I am Silent.  It’s actually very simple: it is hard for me to be nasty when I am not speaking.  My negative reactions are limited to my two middle fingers, so as long as I have a drink in one hand and a sandwich in the other, all I can do is smile.  Silence has taken away my ability to insult and complain, and I can no longer accidentally say the wrong thing when I am not saying anything.

Everyone is nicer to me when I am Silent.  Because my communication is pretty-much limited to a smile, people are not likely to be nasty to me either.  Whether I am perceived as a deaf-mute or just a lost foreigner, I have found that smiling and saying nothing gets me more slack.  (On a trip to my province, it backfired and got me a one-hundred-peso tricycle ride, but I only accepted that proposition because I was being nice!)

Silence allows me to be greater.  The obvious skill-upgrade is that I am an infinitely better listener now that I am not thinking about what to say when you are done talking.  I am no longer waiting for my turn to speak, so I am able to allow you to try to talk my ears off.

Since I did not want to be limited to being the smiling deaf-mute-lost-foreigner, I’ve had to come up with ways to communicate more efficiently – or rather, to communicate directly and briefly.  If I absolutely had to say something, I would have to write it down or look you in the eye to telepathically insert an idea into your head.  Both methods seem to work equally well.

That means two very important things: One, whoever I was communicating with had to come closer; and Two, whatever I wanted to say was limited by how much I wanted to scribble.  That meant there was no longer any room for my tirades.  Nobody would stand there and wait for me to scribble three notebook pages of what I thought about the way he did his job...and then read everything.  Whatever I had to say, it was reduced to only what was essential.  Only what had to be said.  I found that eight words or less usually did the trick.

Having someone physically closer meant we were more likely face-to-face, with plenty of now-necessary eye contact.

You have to understand:  I grew up in a house where people had a lazy habit I call “shouting through walls to communicate.”  Basically, instead of anybody leaving whatever room they were in, they would just shout and hope that whoever they were talking in the other room was listening.  A phone call would have been just as lazy (my mom uses the wireless phone to call our other landline to tell the maid to bring her a glass of water), but at least a phone call gives you some kind of guarantee that you are in fact communicating with somebody. 

In my silence, shouting through walls was no longer an option, and neither was calling the cellphone of my sister in the other room.  I had to physically move to be with the target of my communication.  It had become more personal.  It would be quite hard to ignore a six-foot tall mime standing next to you trying to tell you something.

My Silence allows others to speak.  My cousin insists on calling me on the phone despite knowing he will be doing all the talking.  Surprisingly, people get used to this condition sooner than anyone expected.  My cousin, my close friends, they all talk to me on and on as if nothing had changed.  This is either a testament to my Silence being more conducive for them to open up to, or I am just finally noticing how goddam much they really want to talk.

Silence allows me to leave my Ego at the door. I discovered – rather painfully at first – that the quieter I got, the more judgement I had to be defenceless against.  I can only sit still while a friend rips into me for living the life I’ve lived.  I could only sit still and be on the receiving end of a vicious judgmental assault where my entire personality was blamed for everything that went wrong.  It was all I could do to resist the urge to call time out and give my friend a piece of my mind strapped to five pounds of plastic explosive.

I can fight the urge to speak, but I do not want my silence to be a result of fighting the urge to speak.  If I am silent, it should be because I find no need to speak.  I am learning day by day that, contrary to everything my rational genius-level IQ tells me, people do not have to be corrected.  No matter how wrong I think they are (and goddammit, they all are!).  Silence, Ego!

Silence allows me to allow others to be greater.  Without my Ego running my mouth, I create significantly less opportunities for me to try to “be better than” everyone. 

I am the kind of guy who ALWAYS wants to win.  In the context of a conversation, “winning” is being the first guy who comes up with the answer to a question.  Winning is coming up with the wittiest retort or the perfect comeback or the funnier anecdote or the sharpest side-comment.  Winning is saying whatever it took to invalidate the other peoples’ ideas to make mine supreme. 

By not talking, I allow everyone else to come up with “winners” - I bite down hard on my lip as my mind screams “I thought of that a good five minutes before you said it!”  But they do not have to know that.  It’s surprisingly nice to let people win.

One of my saddest memories – one of those super rare things that I wish I could change – is the way I could never let my own wife win over me.  Whether it was a video game, a board game, a philosophical discussion, what to wear, or what route to take from Paranaque to Pasig, I always fought to win.  It makes me infinitely sad to realize that I had been trading the smile on her face for a notch on my belt.  I gave up all those opportunities to make her a winner!

Silence makes us all pay more attention.  I pay attention because I have no choice.  I am no longer planning my responses, so I can notice the situation better.  Also, when we communicate, I cannot pacify you with the non-committal “uh huh” – I must look at you, and you must look at me.  There is always that playful suspense when the person I am with wonders if I might actually suddenly speak.  While they wait, and when I do, I know they will be paying attention.

I notice the true source of noise.  The honking cars and revving engines are just a small part of the noise.  Most of the noise is chatter from people filling up the silences in their lives.  I dined with a few friends at a mall one time, and I was astounded at what I noticed:  If I recorded everything – every single word – of the conversation, and then accidentally deleted the recording, no one would miss it!  Every word was completely expendable!

And then there was the time I laughed at an anecdote and someone said “Huy, bakit ka tumatawa (Why are you laughing)?  Hindi ka kasali dito!  (You are not part of this!)”

Ah, my own mother!  Apparently, I was not considered part of a conversation if I did not contribute to it.  Apparently, listening is not acknowledged as a valid contribution!  What pathological talker invented this little social rule?!?  How many times have we been told to “Make some noise!” to be part of the community?

It is easier to be silent when there is much noise.  When the noise disappears, suddenly my mind is the only source of chatter.  In those moments I honestly struggle.  Alone, I might simply start talking to myself.

It is easier to be silent when I am with people who are not close to me.  When I am alone with people I know intimately, the urge to speak is at the maximum.  The irony is that these are the people I am most likely to hurt when I do break my silence.  They are the ones I have been most reckless with.

Silence is contagious.  I suspected this at the start, but I had no idea how true this was until the day my driver stopped speaking to me.  It was not because he was ignoring me, mind you, he was still very much communicating with me.  But instead of speaking, he has taken to typing messages on his beat-up Nokia 3310 and showing me what he wanted to say to me:

“w8 kita here, ok?”

And then as I get out of the car, he would show me his phone again:  “God Bless!”

The people I dine with have taken to falling silent as well – and not because they are tired of talking.  Whereas my driver is silent out of support and empathy, most people match my silence because they are comfortably (or unwillingly and uncomfortably?) quiet.  Finally, food is enjoyed the way it should be.  We eat mindfully.  Buddha would be proud of us.

Maybe I am helping people discover that Silence is not that bad a place to be in.  It is a place where nothing is being said because nothing needs to be said.  I cannot think of a better way to spend an evening than to sit across the love of my life and look into her eyes while we run our fingers along each others’ bodies...

Silence is just the beginning.  I need to be wary of my Ego.  It is constantly trying to creep into my silence and undermine its peace.  It starts by creating a wall between me and the rest of “The Fools Who Speak.”  It is telling me that I am the “Enlightened Silent One” and sneering at all the “Talkers” - This is NOT why I am Silent.  I am silent so that I can learn to accept things and take away my nasty impulses to correct people, to beat them, to win, to be heard, to be right...

One word from my Ego, and all this noise re-enters my life.

Perhaps Eddie Vedder said it best when he sang:  “Once divided nothing left to subtract. Some words when spoken can’t be taken back.”

For someone who no longer speaks, I still talk too fucking much.  I am still hemorrhaging words but at least now I am trying to bleed responsibly, and not all over your living room.

I have been asked how long I can keep this Silence up.  How much longer will I be on my “Silent Retreat”...?  I cannot properly answer that question, because I am no longer in retreat.

This silence is where I live now, I moved here.  I mean to dwell here.  I am not here visiting or punishing myself.  It is not a tourist attraction or a prison.

This has been a nice visit, but I must return home now.  Every once in a while I may take another “Speaking Retreat.”  We can talk again then.

See the day-to-day journal of my journey Into Greater Silence on http://ispeaknolonger.blogspot.com/