17-July-2022

11:30 pm

I’m pretty sure that most of my readers live in a city or in a town where there a lot of people and activities. Where it is filled with noise coming from different places. The noise from vehicles plying the roads, the trains, the workmen busy working in their workshop.

The city life is lively and filled with the buzz of busyness. The only time it is silent is perhaps late at night when most of its occupant are resting after the day task.

We can’t deny that we all yearn for the comfort the night provides. In the night everywhere is peaceful and calm. It's perhaps only in the night you can hear your clock ticks in the city.

Many seek silence

Quietness is synonymous to peace. War front is never silent, it is always filled with sounds of different types of artilleries being fired. We can liken the city life to a battle ground where it is always noisy. Some cities never sleep even in the middle of night; there are people and cars still out there.

Sometimes we do want a break from the noise around, that's why people who can afford it, go to the countryside to unwind the stress accumulated by living in a city.

Sometimes we need the quietness, to enable us to think and reason well. It is not a coincidence that some people are always inspired in the middle of the night or love studying at night.

I’m the type of student that love studying in silence and occasionally I visit the library, because that the only place that silence reign. Every other places in the school are filled with different forms of distraction.

An oxymoron

People seek solitude because they sometimes yearn to hear the "sound of silence". Wait what am I saying? Does silence have any sound, I thought silence means "no sound" right?

Firstly, the phrase “sound of silence” in English language is considered a figure of speech called: “oxymoron”.

For those who might not be familiar with the literally term I would make a brief explanation with examples .

Oxymoron is a figure of speech in which two words opposite in meaning are intentionally placed together to make a sentence or phrase.

Examples of oxymorons are: "living dead" (a dead person normally shouldn’t be living right), "pretty ugly" (hmm, how can something be pretty and be ugly at the same time maybe some people’s character lol), "open secret" (a secret is always closed and unknown to other people, so how can a secret become open).

Silence comes with sounds

Back to the topic, is there anything like sounds of silence? Well I think there is! Even though the words are contradicting. It is only when you are in a quiet surrounding can you hear sounds you normally don’t hear. In total silence, you can hear your heartbeat, the sounds of blood pumping close to your ears.

Well those sounds are made by your body system. But you would truly agree with me that mostly in silence is when our inner voice, inside of us speak to us. And like I mentioned earlier it is not magical that a lot of people got inspired in quiet surrounding or seek quietness to get inspired.

Two outcomes

Silence might be attached to a lot of positivity, but it does have negative effect too on some people. Have you been in a place or situation where you are all alone, nobody to talk to, nothing to do.

In such solitude, effect of loneliness can begin to take a toll on your body and mind. One of the effect of loneliness is depression, and feeling depressed breeds suicidal thoughts or other abnormalities.

In a poem of mine with a similar title as this article. I wrote that "silence can create great men and monsters too".

So I would like to know what impact does silence have on you?

Thanks for reading