GRIEF | LIFE LESSONS

When Silence is the Best Response

They say it’s golden for a reason

5 min readSep 6, 2022

We live in a world that seems to demand constant engagement and ongoing response at every moment.

Thing is…

we’re usually so busy frantically trying to keep up that we often blindly react instead of choosing how to consciously respond. And I reckon this is where a great deal of Western society’s problems currently reside.

But I’m not an expert.

I’m just a gal who is maybe old enough to share a bit of her experience ‘round about now. And this doesn’t even mean it is worthwhile to anyone else. Or that anyone else is even interested in it.

But I’m also wise enough to know, now, that this doesn’t matter either.

Those who it may benefit from the sharing will find it. And I’ll benefit from the sharing regardless because…

well… connection is the point.

For me.

And it’s not even about me at the end of the day, even though it seems to be all about me… almost always.

Despite this interest in human connection I tend to take extended breaks of isolation and silence.

Carl Jung said it, as he said so many other very relevant things regarding the human experience, really well:

Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words. — Carl Jung

I relate to this deeply on so many levels.

In fact, as I’ve grown to know myself better with age, I’ve come to understand I not only enjoy my solitude and the silence it brings but that this is an absolute necessity for me to be the best version of myself. For myself and for those around me as well.

And I think the spaces in-between do that for all of us, in fact.

We call this time out “the in-between” quite commonly nowadays. The philosophical concept of “liminality” as it is less commonly referred to.

It can be seen as a kind of “waiting” and, I supposed, it is in some sense.

But it is also, in my new found experience, very much a form of “doing” as well. A form of “becoming” as much as it is a form of “letting go”.

Which are both pretty much a part of the same process if we are growing and progressing, aren’t they?

But us humans have been taught to be oh so productive that we are missing a great deal of the most necessary parts of the journey, in my (sometimes opinionated now) opinion.

And this because we’ve been taught to avoid the quiet and silence to such an extent that we aren’t familiar or comfortable enough to allow either to do their work.

Or for nature to take it’s inevitable course.

This ends up with us getting to a point in the future… where we haven’t really learned what we maybe needed to figure out before we got there.

It’s kinda like being employed in a senior position in a business without having worked one’s way up to that position of authority. Or being able to buy your way into a position of authority without the life learning to make good use of it for the right reasons, I guess.

You have the perks of the position without important knowledge you may have acquired if you’d taken the longer route to get there.

And this means… very often… that one has to circle back and do it all again to get it “right”.

The same can be said about life and its experiences.

Sometimes, in life, we have to “sit” with the things we would prefer to avoid… to ensure we move through them fully, make sense of them fully, learn what we must from them fully and so…

leave them behind us permanently.

Unless we need to refer to them in the present to make use of the learning of course!

But we humans are often not taught how to do this at all anymore.

And I reckon this is where a great deal of Western society’s problems currently reside as well.

Toby is gone

Toby passed away peacefully while I held him on Sunday 14th August 2022.

So I have been quiet around here, not only because the bugs turned out to be just one tick that floored me (and if I had known more about Lyme’s whatever I may have not let things get as bad as they did), but because…

at this point in my journey I know enough to know that sometimes the best thing I can do is to quieten down and Be Here Now.

Grieving properly requires this in full.

And this is what I have been busy doing.

And by busy… I mean slowing down and staying as present as possible for the process.

But, once again, we Westerners are generally not taught how to grieve.

I find this sad when grieving is, arguably, one of the most important and fundamental aspects of living. And, thus, is one of the most important skills to learn.

Because grief is, unquestionably, the single most complicated process a human being will experience. And if it is not done well a person can remain stuck in the process for years. If not permanently.

I know this (for myself) because of my own experience.

I took the time to attend a workshop on grief twice because I saw immediately that the process was bigger and far more complex than the one attendance could encompass. For me and my endless questioning.

So I requested to attend it again to get a more concrete understanding of grief. So that I could assist others with it professionally as much as due to my own endless curiosity and desire to learn. And to understand more.

I also had personal experience of what happens if grief is avoided after my father’s suicide. His passing was (largely due to Western concepts of suicide) never discussed and, thus, was never properly grieved or let go of until many years later when I understood more about how (and why) to do this.