It is a wonderful balm to step aside from the noise of the world, even for a few moments each day, and allow ourselves the gift of silence. It is not too much to ask of ourselves. Any quiet place will do, even if there are external distractions. Because we are talking about cultivating an inner silence.
There is a remarkable passage in Beryl Markham’s West with the Night where she describes the different kinds of silences of her childhood in Africa in the early years of the 20th century.
“There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.”