There are many types of silence.
Not all of them are positive, such as those that seem to linger for an age following an awkward comment or when waiting for a telling-off to come, but silence, to me, most often carries positive attributes. For one thing, silence carries its own time and space allowing you to gather your thoughts, to think new ones, to let an idea or daydream expand, or even to simply clear the mental decks with a brandy in hand at the end of a long day. Silence is also inviting. A long period of silence opens the door to being filled with music or conversation, or even just a prolonged plunge into the mental quietude of a journey through a good book. In our hectic 24/7 society, it’s one of the few things that is becoming a rare commodity and difficult to find with any regularity. More’s the pity.
Got my briefcase? My keys? “Right, love, I’m off!” I called out to Rachel as I set out through the door for the walk to work. As per usual, I popped my earphones in, turned on some soft jazz and marched on into the sleety dark. It never takes me long to slip into a daydreamy walking rhythm, and that morning was no exception. Head down against the chilly breeze, feet tracking on autopilot through the slush, I was halfway to work when “Huh? Whassat?!” I was shivered into awareness by an icy bleb landing on the end of my nose. No, not a bleb at all, nor ice, I quickly realised. A snowflake. I looked up and saw that there had been a sudden subtle shift in the weather, the sleet had transformed into snow and it was now starting to fall more steadily. I stopped and watched for a while, quickly switching off my music and removing my earphones. Snow is such a rarity here on the coast that I felt the need to do something more to note its coming. I wanted to hear it as well as see it.
Trying to hear snow is not so strange as it sounds, for you’re not necessarily listening for noises themselves (though there are a few of those if you listen carefully enough); rather, you are eavesdropping upon the ripple of silence it creates. I walked on, with this gentle hush widening around me in so many ways: of course, the pattering of rain had disappeared, but the traffic was now more muffled too. The tentative morning chorus of birds receded back into muteness. With each new realisation I banked up a silent soundscape around me, continuing my journey as though in some kind of vacuum, aware only of a million tiny impacts as the flakes tapped against my hood and slid down my coat, or began to stick where they settled.
After arriving at school a short while later, I quickly left my coat and briefcase in the office, grabbed mug of coffee and headed toward the back doors, keen to take full advantage of this rare moment. The snow had strengthened still further into a heavy flurry now, a winter blossom-fall, mute and beautiful. Many adhere to the adage that ‘silence is golden’, but in that moment I disagreed entirely. Silence is white. The gentlest silence. The softest silence. I leaned against the door jamb, coffee in hand, simply watching this lovely thing just happen around me – the bare outlines of trees disappearing then reappearing with each puff of wind, the floor carpeted – and thought of the billions of individual flakes, their crystalline structures and the way that nature had actually constructed space and silence into each flake in the most beautiful and unique ways, the symmetrical and intricate pattern-chambers that glinted and glimmered as they tumbled to Earth.
It couldn’t last long, it never does here. But while it fell, and while my mug of coffee lasted, I watched the pupils trickle in through the gates in ones and twos, emerging through the whiteness like shadows of themselves until they stepped into the school building and appeared to become more solid then, delivered from that glorious, soundless void as though stepping back through the wardrobe from Narnia and into the day that waited for them.
