#6. Do we really need silence?

 I think we must be grateful. For we are alive. We can live. We have to be thankful for all that. It’s something poetess and philosopher Marcela Duque says on an interview to her I read few days ago. And I can’t be more in agreement. 

We must have an awe for life. And we would have it if we respected and wanted silence. We live, in modern Western countries, so absorbed in a hasty lifestyle. We don’t have time for thinking. And is there anything as important as thinking? 

Silence is so important. Not only do I say it, but also Cardinal Robert Sarah, Spanish writer Federico Delclaux, and psychiatrist, teacher, and writer Luis Gutiérrez Rojas. 

We ought to love silence. At its time. 

We do need silence to listen to our spouse, to our children, to God, to myself, to my conscience – God speaks to it. No silence, no ideas about what really matters in our life. Let’s switch off the music, because we do need that silence. Let’s take off our headphones. 

Something else we must listen to is nature. Western man is above all urban, and we need to listen to birds, to a dog barking in the distance, to a cock early in the morning. And contemplate nature, trees, clouds in our sky. Etty Hillesum said some so beautiful things about contemplating our sky. And she said that when she and her Jewish people were persecuted by the Nazis in the Second World War, and taken to Auschwitz. Jacques Philippe tells about that in one of his unforgettable books. 

Contemplating is something Western man does not dedicate much time to, if any. And to musing. And do you know what we may be missing? Happiness. I want to develop this point on other posts.