Sit With Yourself

Take silence, the void, or the moving parts of it, and instead of running from it, give it a shape. Let it be a companion, carrying thoughts as varied, as complex, as interesting as the ones you carry.  A relieving experience. A trusted friend. A necessary good, and sometimes an evil too.

Silence, personified.  Take a case, study it, and find the evidence you once left behind.

Hi, I’m Silence, You do know me. Still, a proper introduction is owed.

I’m the only space that actualizes thought; the pause between the words your mouth carries, between the moment you imagined a step, a stance, a chance, and the moment you took it. I was right there. Yet you call me irrelevant. Unkind. Dead. Did you know some say I’m insensitive?

I’m in the middle of your decisions as we speak; planting doubts, second thoughts, a perspective you didn’t ask for,

On that education you keep circling but won’t commit to. Money na hand, knowledge na investment… oh, you thought that was yours? I probably said it first.

On the friendship you’ve outgrown, I was there too, in the way you started saying less, in the way you left without a scene, because somewhere back you’d already decided it no longer served you.

You called it grace. I call it silence, the sentence you didn’t finish, 

The door you didn’t slam. I probably gave you that word as well.

So sit with yourself. Sit with yourself, intentionally.

And hear the throbbing of your heartbeat, 

And the wheezing hum from the air conditioner

The wind of gossip that passes you by. 

Every hum carries a whisper, and every whisper, a piece of you. 

Oh dear; sit with yourself, and you’ll learn something new.

Sit with yourself in silence, and hear the echoes from the other room, the one where you become the subject, where the praises pour and something in you tightens. 

Did you feel the room change around your name? 

Oh dear. Sit with yourself; you already knew.

Sit with yourself in silence, and hear your own thoughts fill the room; dark, then cold, then almost light again. Did you notice how they moved, and where they stopped? 

No, dear. Sit with yourself. 

There’s nothing new here, only you, finally still enough to see it.

All along, you were whole. Silence never meant to tear that apart. It was only ever the ones who used silence as a weapon who did, the silence held over you, not the silence held with you.

Oh dear, sit with yourself in silence, and you’ll hear something — you!