Enjoy the silence

Enjoy the Silence ©

By Michael Casey

Depeche Mode are singing and the song is “Enjoy the Silence” so I’m writing on the same theme. The girls are out, church first now out in town, celebrating mum’s new job no doubt. If I’m lucky they’ll bring back some leftovers from the food they are tucking into.

So I’m enjoying the silence, me and my music on the computer. Do you enjoy silence? In a way it’ nice but in another way it’s just too silent, hence the music. Silence is too clean, Depeche Mode have moved on to that track now, clean. Having Irish blood, silence is meant to be filled, silence is to be avoided.

Yes it’s nice to be quiet but then silence drags on. I think Scandinavians enjoy the silence or so we are told, but you never know what goes on in those saunas. Why are you so silent in the first place?

They say people are quiet because they have something to hide, or because the cat has got their tongue. Or because they have been demoted, or pushed sideways out of the way. Now they have had a sock put in it, they  have been silenced. Their face has dropped,  their smirk has wiped off their face. They have been forcibly silenced.

Silence does speak volumes. We have been chirping away, now we are quiet, as if somebody is dead. Silence is golden or so they say. Shut UP! We used to tell our singing sister. Didn’t work, 45years on and still she’s singing. My own girls are both in a choir, so music always fills the air.

Silence can bring us closer to our God, but so can swearing at him, the boils have to be lanced, if cursing works then use it. We get things off our chest, then we may breakdown and cry, but then in the silence afterwards we are at peace.

Me right now, the music has stopped, I can hear the clock ticking on the shelf to my right. Its company for me, in the other room the chiming clock chimes again, its 2.45pm. The tick and the tock are breaths breaking down the silence into manageable parts. If each tick and each tock  lasted 10 seconds or more then the silence would be too long, we’d be holding our breath till the next one came along.

Time does fly when you enjoy yourself, when you are not enjoying yourself then you look at your watch or the clock constantly. It seems forever for your food to arrive, for the train to come, for the bus to get you home. Then once you are together again with the love of your life, then all the minutes and seconds and even hours are forgot.

You can come home and just hold hands with your lover, your mother, your old dad, your sister home from Brazil. Holding hands and smiling, enjoying the silence together. Silence is whatever you want it to be, silence is not silence. Silence is a breath.

me and the girls 8 years ago