Sunday is a good day to talk about silence.

Not the kind we experience in our sleep, but a waking silence.  It’s hard to come by these days, usually because we are never truly alone in our digital “always-on” world.  The buzzes and bells of alerts and notifications constantly interrupt and command our attention.

Yet, before we blame all the excess noise on our phones, it’s worth remembering that human beings have experienced a silence deficit for generations.  Long before the smart phone, people lamented how television, radio, telephones, telegraphs – pick your new technology – made peace and quiet hard to come by.

If you spend part of your Sundays in a church, you’ll hear scripture readings about people who lived thousands of years ago taking solitary retreats into the desert.  Even in an age when the only way one could communicate was face-to-face, humans had to go out of their way to find silence.

What does this tell us?

First, silence matters.  A lot.  Silence is foundational for good health, right up there with diet, fitness and sleep.  Silence shuts out the distractions and quiets the mind.  Only when we cultivate a practice of silence do we learn to truly commune with our own thoughts, understand and process our emotions, and find the mental and spiritual refreshment we need to better engage with the world and others. 

Also, as much as we like to point to the finger at external distractions, it turns out that the biggest impediment to achieving silence comes from inside ourselves.  We have trouble turning off the noise inside our heads telling us we don’t have the time or need for silence.

If you haven’t experience silenced in a while, today, Sunday, is a good day to start.  Close the laptop, put the phone away, turn off the TV and find a place to sit quietly, even if it’s just for five or ten minutes. Make it a regular practice and you’ll find that the silence speaks more loudly about what it takes to be happy and content than you ever imagined.