I thought it would be fun to share a snippet from the new book I’m writing, Submit to the Pause: The Power of Being Slow in a World Going Too Fast. I have been working on this book for the past four years. In the passage below, taking from chapter 4, I explore how silence and patience shouldn’t just be seen as a stopgap when conversation has lulled, but integral to healthy communication and friendships.
True communication and mutual listening occurs only when friendship is moved out of the realm of production and into the realm of contemplative immersion. For then language exists, not against a backdrop of production, but against a backdrop of stillness.
Most communication today does not exist against a backdrop of stillness, and the results are shallow friendships. Yet listening to silence—and being able to linger in silence with those we love—is key to flourishing friendships. It is often overlooked that a truly great friend is someone you can be silent with – someone you trust enough to simply be still in his or her presence. But this is incredibly difficult for people in the United States. Michele DeMarco explains that a four second pause in a conversation is enough for Americans to start feeling awkward and insecure. By contrast, “Japanese people are happy to sit in silence with others for up to 8.2 seconds.”[i]
Our anxiety about long pauses may have deep roots in primal survival mechanisms, including uncertainty avoidance. “In the quiet space between spoken words lurks uncertainty,” Dr. Michele DeMarco observes, adding,
Human beings generally don’t embrace uncertainty well. What we don’t know, we can’t control—and what we can’t control casts us into an unsafe and insecure limbo, with anticipation about what might be said or how others will respond fueling anxiety.
Even when we’re by ourselves, silence can be ominous; we can’t escape our automatic thoughts, particularly the ones that spotlight fears and insecurities; this can cause rumination. Unstructured moments of silence can also make us aware of aspects of ourselves and of life that the structure of noise drowns out. Silence can wake us up to truth—truths that we may not want to acknowledge.[ii]
The inability to pause in conversation—the compulsion to fill empty space with activity and noise—is evident in our habits of digitally-mediated conversation. In new texting etiquette, many people now consider it rude not to reply to messages the same day. But that interval seems to be shrinking. Some people feel ignored when you do not reply to a text in an hour. Lack of immediate response to text messages or emails sends some people on a roller coaster ride of anxiety, while research apparently confirms that if you care about someone then you will reply to their messages quickly.[iii] But the haste also extends to reading: if reading literature is corelated with cognitive patience, reading text messages is correlated with impatience, as seen in the common habit of ignoring text messages deemed “too long.” If letters are “frendships sacraments [sic],” as the Elizabethan poet John Donne observed,[iv] then text messages are the sacraments of haste and impatience.
Do these changing norms—including the inability to go slow or pause in conversations, whether verbal or digital—correlate with more shallow relationships? Is our discomfort with silence or periods of inactivity related to increased superficiality in our communication? I think so. Whereas the ancient tradition of letter-writing had a leisured quality that could allow for long pauses—days, weeks, even months—between responses, the burden of immediacy we attach to digital conversation creates a sense of freneticism that undermines the tranquility so essential for meaningful communication and deep friendship. Ultimately, this reflects not only the shallowness of our relationships, but the poverty of the modern sense of self.
To be unavailable is to be human whereas to be constantly available—to be “on”—is to be a machine. For a machine to be still or unavailable is usually indicative of malfunction, or else an inconvenient necessity given the need to cool down. As modern man comes to think of himself in the image of the machine, he too becomes highly anxious by the unavailability of others; hence pauses become problematized. But just as the desire for diversion is a signal to burrow deeper into stability, and just as the desire for noise can indicate a need for quietude, so the desire for constant communication can be received as an invitation to lean into solitude. Then we may find that silence and patience are not just stopgaps when conversation has lulled, but integral to healthy communication and relationships.
Further Reading
- St. Paisios on Simple Living
- The Power of the Pause Gregorian Chant, Leisure, and the Joy of Going Slow
References
[i] Michele DeMarco, “Why Being Comfortable with Silence Is a Superpower,” Psychology Today, June 10, 2024, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/soul-console/202406/why-being-comfortable-with-silence-is-a-superpower.
[ii] DeMarco.
[iii] Bryan Lufkin, “The Crippling Expectation of 24/7 Digital Availability,” BBC, February 8, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220207-the-crippling-expectation-of-247-digital-availability.
[iv] John Donne, in Evelyn M. Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), p. 311.