Article on Silence
By Isabel Berckemeyer
Silence can take on many meanings. There is the awkward silence between roommates who had an argument the night before. There’s annoyed silence when you get in the shower that your sibling said they were going to take five minutes ago. There’s tired silence that wedges between friends who are exhausted after a long day of classes or work. There’s mad silence after a fight with your boyfriend or girlfriend. But there’s also this silence that a lot ofpeople don’t talk about and that’s silent silence.
This silence confuses you. It’s when the world around you feels like it may have stopped and now you are in this entirely new universe where no one’s speaking. I had never truly experienced this type of silence until I got on the public transportation systems of London. More specifically, what’s known to many as the tube.
To get to work every morning I take the tube twenty minutes to Wimbledon where I hop off and jump on a train for fifteen minutes and then walk a mile. For the first couple of days, this was stressful and I quickly power walked from platform to platform not thinking about anything else until I arrived at the office. However, once I knew where I was going and got comfortable with the timing, I realized something: no one talks on the public transportation systems in London. And let me tell you, if you do, you will be met with the unfriendly eyes of twenty strangers.
I am accustomed to getting onto the subway in New York and talking to the stranger next to me about what they do, where they’re from, where they’re going, the last thing they ate, and then somehow connecting over the fact that their grandson goes to Syracuse and knows my second cousin. This is American culture. We love finding connections with others. But this is one main norm that’s not the same in London. On the trains in London people prefer silence.
This form of silence scared me at first. Being from a family of six, silence is an unknown concept to me and it’s something I always fill when I’m feeling nervous or anxious. This silence I despised. I so badly wanted to ask the stranger next to me where they were going and what their job was. I wanted to know where their combat boots were from and if they bought them at Harrods. But I couldn’t ask because I would be met with the unfriendly eyes of twenty strangers.
So instead, I put in my air pods and listened to music. I responded to texts from my friends, wished my family members a happy start to the new week, aimlessly scrolled on social media, looked through my calendar for the day, and planned the breaks in which I would escape the office. I avoided this silence at all costs.
It wasn’t until I forgot my air pods one morning that I realized how peaceful this silence really was. This was not an angry, awkward, sad, or tired silence. It was just a silence that hundreds of people were sharing on public transport. Instead of panicking about looking weird I sat there and approached the silence. I thought about how I would write an article about this for Be Well Nova. I also thought about the new impact project Icould ask my boss about starting and I thought about how I should start journaling again. These were all thoughts I wouldn’t have had if it weren’t for the silence around me and my air pods being dead.
The silence that I dreaded so badly made me so much more mindful, thoughtful, and gave me more time to wander into my thoughts, sparked new ideas, and it’s helped me realize that the world around me is not an awkward, sad, lonely, or tired silence. The world around me on the tube is simply just a different type of silence. It’s a silence of curious thought and it’s a silence that’s shared with hundreds of other people. It’s a silence I now look forward to.
