Silence

The reckoning of the only voice that matters.

Mar 09, 2025

The Silence Between the Words

The sky, bruised with the last light of sunset, pressed down low, casting long, creeping shadows over the highway. The road stretched out in front of me, a narrow strip of cracked asphalt that disappeared into the horizon like a thread being pulled through the vast, empty forest. The truck hummed beneath me, its engine's rhythmic vibration traveling up through the worn canvas seat. My hands gripped the wheel, knuckles white as bleached bone, the steering wheel's leather warm and smooth from years of similar journeys. My thoughts were louder than the engine, louder than the wind slipping through the cracked window, static of worries echoing in the confined space of my skull.

He sat in the passenger seat, hands folded over his lap, weathered hands with prominent veins mapping a lifetime of labor, fingers slightly curved even in rest. His face was calm, unreadable, deep creases around his eyes and mouth like the rings of an ancient tree, his skin tanned and textured from decades under open skies. Those calm and wise eyes, watched me with the patient attention of someone who had learned that listening was more valuable than speaking.

I couldn’t take the silence anymore. I exhaled sharply, the breath carrying the weight of months of accumulated tension. The words felt inadequate even as they left my mouth, too simple to capture the complexity of what was churning inside me.

"It's just too much, Grandpa."

He sat with the comfortable stillness of a man who had nothing to prove to the world, the stoic and quiet assurance of someone who had already weathered every storm life could conjure. He looked at me like he already knew what I was going to say, what I needed to hear, and was simply waiting for me to find my way to the questions he'd been answering his entire life.

"Too much of what, boy?"

I clenched my jaw, feeling the muscles tighten along my temples, a familiar tension headache threatening at the edges of my consciousness. My fingers flexed against the wheel, seeking grounding in the physical world as my mind spun faster.

"Everything. The world is so... loud. Everyone's talking, yelling, fighting. Telling me how to dress, how to act, hell… even how to live. I can't think. I feel like I can’t catch my own breath."

Grandpa chuckled softly, the sound rumbling from deep in his chest like distant thunder, the way he always had, like he was savoring a joke no one else had quite figured out yet. The corners of his eyes crinkled into a tapestry of lines, each one etched by moments from his long life.

"And what do you do when it's loud?"

I hesitated, my mouth opening then closing as I searched for words that wouldn't sound childish to a man who had lived through war, economic collapse, and personal loss without ever seeming overwhelmed. The highway lines blurred in my vision as I focused inward, trying to articulate something I had felt but never examined.

"I don't know. Try to drown it out, I guess. Put in my headphones, scroll through my phone, keep busy. Just... keep moving."

He sighed, a sound containing neither judgment nor disappointment, just recognition, and turned to look out at the passing forest of trees. The window glass reflected his profile. The receding hairline that unfortunately had been passed down through generations, the slight forward tilt of his head that always spoke of attentiveness, and the always steadliy focused demeanor.

"You ever sit still in the noise?"

I scoffed, the sound harsh and defensive even to my own ears, a reflexive shield against wisdom I wasn't ready to receive. My foot pressed harder on the accelerator, the speedometer needle climbing as if speed could outrun the conversation.

"What good would that do?"

He turned back to me, his movement unhurried, deliberate in the way of someone who had learned that rushing rarely improved outcomes. His eyes were steady and reflecting. Between us hung the unspoken history of all the times he had waited for me to understand something he already knew, his patience a tangible presence in the truck's cabin.

"You ever listen to silence?"

I frowned, my brow furrowing deep enough to feel the skin tighten. The statement felt right when it formed in my mind but somehow hollow once spoken aloud, like a rehearsed line that lost its conviction in performance.

"Silence is nothing. It's just the absence of sound."

Grandpa smiled, slow and deliberate. His smile had never been hard to earn but never felt empty like a social reflex.

"No, boy. Silence is where everything begins. It's where thoughts take shape. Where the world stops telling you what to think, and you start hearing your own mind again."

I loosened my grip on the wheel slightly, blood returning to my whitened knuckles in a warm tingle. My shoulders descended from their perch near my ears, a tension I hadn't recognized until it began to dissolve. The road ahead was empty, stretching like a promise into darkness. The headlights carved a tunnel of visibility through the gathering night, illuminating occasional reflective markers that winked like knowing eyes. Driving through nowhere, a nowhere that suddenly seemed vast with possibility rather than emptiness.

Grandpa's voice was low, steady, like the deep rumble of a storm in the distance, a sound that seemed to emerge not just from his throat but from the earth itself. It filled the cabin with resonance, each word carrying the weight of experience, each pause deliberate with unspoken understanding. The voice had aged like fine whiskey, growing richer and more complex with time, carrying notes of joy, sorrow, and the peculiar wisdom that comes only from having lived fully.

"People fill their lives with noise because they're afraid of what they'll hear in the quiet. Afraid of themselves. Afraid of the truth. But silence isn't emptiness. It's space."

Something tightened in my chest, not the constriction of anxiety that had become so familiar, but a different sensation, like a knot beginning to loosen. My breath had slowed without me realizing it, no longer shallow and hurried but deep and rhythmic, drawing oxygen to depths of my lungs that had been neglected. The tension in my jaw released, teeth no longer grinding against each other like tectonic plates. The world outside felt still, like even the wind had stopped to listen.

"But what do I do in silence?"

Grandpa looked at me for a long time before answering, his gaze penetrating yet gentle, like he was seeing past my features to something essential beneath. In that extended moment, the tick of the cooling engine marked time, the metal contracting with soft, intermittent pings. A lone headlight approached from the opposite direction, grew to blinding brightness, then passed, leaving us again in the darkness of our shared journey. His breathing was even, meditative, an unconscious demonstration of the very principle he was teaching.

"You let go."

I swallowed, the sound audible in the quietness that had descended upon us. My throat felt tight, as if reluctant to release the question that might change everything.

"Let go of what?"

He reached over and grabbed my arm, just as he did when I was a kid. Not to demand my attention, but to steady me, to anchor me in a moment that felt like it might slip away.

”Everything that isn't yours. The voices of the world. The expectations. The noise. Just let it pass through you. And when the silence settles… you'll hear the only voice that matters."

My heartbeat thudded, slow and heavy, each pulse sending blood rushing through my ears in waves that matched the rhythm of the tires on asphalt. The cadence seemed to whisper with each beat: The. Only. Voice. That. Matters. Something ancient and forgotten stirred within me, like sediment disturbed after years of stillness, rising to the surface of consciousness. The dashboard lights seemed to dim, or perhaps my perception had shifted, drawing my awareness inward rather than outward.

I turned my head, neck muscles moving with deliberate slowness, as if underwater.

The passenger seat was empty. Not just unoccupied but pristine, the fabric unwrinkled, the seatbelt lying flat against the backrest, its metal buckle reflecting the dashboard lights in cold glints. No impression remained in the cushion, no lingering warmth, no trace of the physical presence I had felt so completely moments before.

My breath caught, a half inhale suspended in shock. The worn denim jacket, the calloused hands, the knowing eyes, gone. The truck's cabin suddenly seemed larger, the space between the driver's seat and passenger door an uncrossable chasm filled with questions I couldn't articulate. The truck hummed forward, steady and silent, its mechanical rhythm utterly indifferent to the impossible conversation it had just contained.

I let out a breath, my fingers easing on the wheel. The weight in my chest lifted, just slightly, enough to create a space where something new could grow.

I listened, not to music, not to the world, not to anything outside myself. The absence of external sound revealed a subtle symphony previously drowned: the percussion of tires on pavement, the string section of wind through the window gap, the deep bass of the engine's vibration, and beneath it all, the steady conductor of my own heartbeat.

The silence that wasn't empty but full of possibility, of presence, of peace that had been waiting patiently for me to notice it. The miles unwound before me, but for once, I wasn't racing toward a destination or away from a memory. I was simply being, moving through space while allowing space to move through me.

And for the first time in a long time, I wasn't afraid. The darkness beyond my headlights no longer seemed threatening but welcoming, a vast canvas of potential rather than an abyss. The tension that had been my constant companion for so long had eased its grip, leaving behind a curious lightness. I drove onward, carrying my grandfather's absence and presence both, into a night that felt more like a beginning than end.

I smiled as a familiar wave of calm settled over me. “Thanks, Grandpa. You always seemed to know what I needed, long before I did.”

-🏴‍☠️-Essay-🏴‍☠️-

Currency of Silence

In our hyperconnected world, silence has become a rare commodity. We’ve filled every moment with noise, distractions, and endless stimulation. We’ve traded our thoughts for algorithms, our solitude for curated feeds, our moments of stillness for an endless barrage of information that doesn’t belong to us. We exist in a world where quiet is the enemy, where being alone with our own thoughts feels like some kind of failure. We’ve been conditioned to fear the void, to believe that if we aren’t consuming, producing, or engaging, we are wasting time. But within silence lies an untapped super power. A gateway to self discovery, creativity, and genuine connection with ourselves.

This essay isn’t about merely appreciating silence. It’s about fighting for it. Because the world is built to keep you distracted, to drown out your own voice with a thousand others. And if you don’t claim the silence for yourself, if you don’t carve out space for your own thoughts to breathe, you will spend your life living someone else’s version of reality. The battle isn’t just against noise. It’s against the slow erosion of your own mind.

The Cost of Fixing Your Life

Sometimes isolation is the price you pay when you start to fix your life.

Not everyone will understand. Not everyone will follow. When you step away from the noise, you step outside the rhythm everyone else is keeping. You stop running with the herd. You begin to notice things, things that make others uncomfortable, things they’ve buried under playlists, Netflix marathons, and the constant hum of a world that doesn’t stop talking. And when you choose to face yourself, when you stop filling the void with endless scrolling and distractions, you start noticing the silence.

And in that silence, the truth comes for you.

It isn’t a gentle whisper. It doesn’t ease into your consciousness like a sunrise. It crashes into you, all at once. The regrets. The mistakes. The things you’ve done. The things you’ve avoided. The falsehoods you’ve built your identity on. The uncomfortable weight of knowing just how much of your life has been dictated by external noise, by things you never truly questioned.

And that’s where most people turn back. They reach for the phone. The playlist. The podcast. Anything to drown it out. Because silence isn’t comfortable, it’s confrontation. But if you want to live with purpose, if you want to own your mind again, you have to let it in. You have to let it break you down before you can rebuild yourself.

When Silence Was Normal

There was a time when we weren’t this weak. When silence wasn’t something to fear.

A long drive at night meant headlights on the road ahead, the hum of the engine, and your thoughts drifting, uninterrupted. There was no need for constant stimulation. The rhythm of the tires on the pavement was enough. You could exist in that space without feeling the pull to fill it. The glow of dashboard lights, the occasional flicker of a neon sign on a highway diner, there was solitude in it, a moment where the world belonged only to you.

Mornings started in stillness. No screen. No instant flood of notifications hijacking your brain before you even took a breath. The world was patient. It waited for you to step into it. You could drink a cup of coffee without scrolling through bad news, listen to the wind move through the trees instead of artificial sound.

There was no rush to escape these moments, no compulsion to fidget with a device, no urgency to be anywhere but where you were. You sat and watched the world move. You saw faces instead of screens, exchanged nods with strangers instead of hiding behind distractions. People could sit together in shared silence without it being awkward, without the desperate need to fill the space with empty words.

Sitting on a porch and watching the sun sink below the horizon, feeling the air shift as night settled in. No rush, no distractions, just the moment, unfiltered and real.

These were once moments of rest, places where your mind could wander. Now, we can’t even stand in line at the grocery store without burying our faces in a screen, desperate to fill every last second with input. We have trained ourselves to fear our own company. And that’s not an accident.

The Invasion of Noise

We invited it in. We let it take over.

Not by force, not by decree, but by choice. By convenience. By giving up small, seemingly insignificant moments until we had none left. We let technology seep into the cracks of our lives, first as a tool, then as a crutch, and finally as a master. We traded solitude for stimulation, reflection for reaction. We told ourselves it was progress. We told ourselves it made life easier. And maybe it did, for a while. Until we forgot what it felt like to be bored. To sit still. To just exist without needing to consume.

Every moment that was once still is now filled. Podcasts to make use of "dead time." Notifications to keep us engaged. The endless scroll of content, perfectly curated to hold our attention just long enough to feed us the next hit. We let the algorithms tell us what to think, what to feel, what to be outraged by. And we welcomed it, not realizing that the more we consumed, the less we created. The more we reacted, the less we thought.

And we don’t even fight it. We welcome it. We’ve convinced ourselves it’s necessary. But if you are never alone with your thoughts, how do you know what’s actually yours? How do you know what you believe, versus what has just been handed to you? How many of your convictions, your fears, your desires are truly your own? Or were they planted there, drip-fed into your subconscious by an endless stream of voices telling you what matters?

This is not just a loss. It’s theft. The slow erosion of our ability to be present, to think deeply, to exist without constant input. We surrendered our mental sovereignty without a fight. And now, most don’t even realize what they’ve lost.

The Sacred Power of Silence

Silence is not emptiness. It’s not something to be filled. It’s something to be fought for. It is an act of rebellion in a world designed to keep you distracted. It is a refusal to be programmed, a rejection of the mental chains disguised as convenience. We were not meant to be passive consumers, endlessly absorbing what others want us to think, feel, and believe. We were meant to think for ourselves, to wrestle with the hard truths that only emerge when the noise dies down. But thinking for yourself is dangerous, to the systems that thrive on conformity, to the industries that profit from your distraction, to the people who fear what might happen if you wake up.

Throughout human history, the practice of intentional quiet has opened doorways to understanding that simply cannot be accessed through constant noise and distraction. The greatest minds in history: warriors, philosophers, revolutionaries, knew this. They sought silence because they knew that within it, clarity is forged. In silence, you begin to see things as they are, not merely as you expect them to be. And that is the most dangerous thing of all. Because when you see things clearly, you start to question them.

The problem isn’t the lack of information, nor is it the ignorance of silence’s power. The real issue is that people mistake access to information for understanding. We are drowning in knowledge yet starving for wisdom. We have endless data but no time to question it. The constant flood of information gives the illusion of insight, but insight doesn’t come from passive consumption. It comes from reflection, from struggle, from sitting in the silence and tearing apart what you think you know until only the truth remains. They consume, they scroll, they absorb but they never stop to sit in the silence and question what they have learned. They take what they see at face value, never holding it up to the fire, never letting it burn away the falsehoods.

To question requires stillness. It demands discomfort. It demands the courage to sit alone with the weight of everything you’ve accepted without challenge. It requires looking at the beliefs you hold and asking yourself: are they truly yours, or are they just echoes of the loudest voices? Most will never ask, because asking means risking everything. It means realizing that much of what they’ve built their identity on might not withstand scrutiny. And in a world that moves too fast for reflection, most will settle for the illusion of knowledge rather than endure the silence required for true understanding. Because once you question, there’s no going back. Once you see through the noise, it can never control you again.

Letting the Madness In

When I got out of the Marine Corps after 20 years, I hit the same wall most of my GWOT1 buddies did. The initial high of freedom, the feeling that the world was finally ours. And then, the reality. The expectations. The suffocating demand to fall in line, to become something I never agreed to be. The world wanted me to trade one uniform for another, to swap chaos for corporate, to file away the experiences that shaped me and adopt a new mask, one that fit neatly into its expectations. I fell for it at first. The noise pulled me in. The distractions, the routines, the need to be "normal." But normal never sat right with me. Normal felt like another cage, another battlefield where the weapons were softer but the fight was just as relentless.

Then, I started letting the madness in. I let the silence creep in through the cracks, seeping into the spaces I had tried so hard to keep filled. It was unsettling at first, like standing unarmed in a fight you didn’t realize you were in. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized that this madness, the thoughts I had buried, the memories I had numbed, the truth I had avoided, wasn’t my enemy. It was the path forward.

Piece by piece, I stripped it all away. I sat with my thoughts. I let the silence do its worst. It tore through me like a wildfire, leaving me exposed and raw. Every regret, every failure, every ghost of the past sat with me in that silence. The chaos I endured, the friends I had lost, the moments that never made it into the stories I tell, it all came roaring back.

And yet, through the fire, something else emerged. Clarity. The noise lost its grip. I saw the world for what it was, saw the illusions for what they had always been. I stopped caring about the things I was told to care about and started focusing on the things that actually mattered: my kids, my wife, my health, my life. And once you see through the illusion, you can’t go back. You don’t want to. Because on the other side of that silence isn’t emptiness. It’s freedom.

Reclaiming Silence in a Noisy World

You want your mind back? Fight for it.

It won’t happen by accident. It won’t be given to you. No one is coming to hand it back after years of conditioning you to fear the quiet. You have to carve out the silence for yourself. And when you do, the world will resist. The noise will claw at you, promising convenience, offering distraction, whispering that silence is unproductive, that reflection is indulgent. It will try to pull you back in because a mind that does not question is easy to control.

And it will be uncomfortable at first. It will feel unnatural, like something is missing. But that feeling is proof that you’ve been living in chains. Silence doesn’t mean absence, it means stripping away the bullshit. The carefully curated feeds, the mindless dopamine loops, the outside voices that have shaped your thoughts more than you ever realized.

You will hear echoes of who you were before the world filled your head with static. You will feel the weight of everything you’ve ignored. And if you can endure that, if you can sit in the silence long enough for the discomfort to break, you will come out the other side sharper. Clearer. You will begin to remember who you are, not who you were told to be.

Over time, the silence stops feeling empty. It becomes something else entirely. It becomes a weapon, a shield, a refuge. It sharpens your mind. It gives you back your own thoughts. And when you have those, the world has no power over you.

Trust me, you’ll be okay. The noise lies, it always does. You are more than what the hollow echoes would have you believe. You are here, not because the universe ordained it, but because you simply are. And that is enough. Purpose isn’t handed down from the stars or scrawled in some cosmic ledger, it’s found in the spaces between the silence and the static, waiting for you to give it meaning.

I love that you are here and reading this, but do me a favor, don’t just nod along and move on to the next distraction. As soon as you are done, close the laptop. Put the phone down. Turn the noise off. And sit with it. Let the silence press against you, let it creep into the spaces you’ve filled with distractions, let it expose the things you’ve been running from. It will be uncomfortable. It might even feel unbearable at first. But let it tear through you. Let it strip away everything that isn’t real. The world will always be waiting when you return. But what you find in the silence might just make you stronger than the world ever wanted you to be.

Like Grandpa said “Just let it pass through you. And when the silence settles… you'll hear the only voice that matters."