Silence.

Fun fact: I’m an introvert.

If you know me, then you probably knew that already. Someone once told me I was really good at hiding it, but I never feel like that. I love being around friends, I love to hang out with people, but I’m pretty quiet and withdrawn when I am around anyone. And while I hate to be separated from friends for a long time, I also need time to “recharge”. To be by myself, preferably in silence. Everything around us is always rush, rush, rush. The world moves really fast and everyone is always in a hurry. And there’s always noise. But quite often it’s nice to step back and enjoy time alone. I think everyone has a need for silence. A need for everything to just be still around them for some time.

Unfortunately, silence is very difficult to find anymore. One of the reasons for that is technology. We now have speakers, headphones, iPods, and radios that are constantly blaring music at us. It seems like nobody can go anywhere without taking their noise with them. That noise can come in many forms, but I think music is the most prevalent. Just to be clear, I don’t have anything against listening to music at times, but there should be more emphasis on silence in our lives. We should have time to be alone with nothing but our thoughts.

The Washington post reports that 95% of adults have very little imagination, and imagination decreases with each year that goes by. That seems like a random statistic that has no purpose in this post, but I’m going to propose an idea. Maybe, just maybe, because of all the noise around us, because of the less time we have alone with our thoughts, the clamor of the world is leading to the decrease of our imagination. Is it possible that because we are always listening to music (or anything else) we are losing our imagination? Younger kids generally have more imagination then teenagers and adults, but now, they are also have phones and iPods and less silence. And I know, it’s a big step to say that listening to music is taking away our imagination, but I think it is very safe to say that we don’t have much time for silence in our lives and that imagination among children and adults is decreasing. I believe there is a correlation between those two things. I believe that we need silence.

When everything is quiet, we tend to dream more, we tend to think bigger thoughts about what could be. Nothing is demanding our attention, so we are able to focus on thinking. In order to make a change, we have to have the ability to see that it is possible, we have to dream of the world we could make. The lyrics in the song A Million Dreams from The Greatest Showman sum up the importance of dreaming:

“We can live in a world that we design
'Cause every night I lie in bed
The brightest colors fill my head
A million dreams are keeping me awake
I think of what the world could be
A vision of the one I see
A million dreams is all it's gonna take
A million dreams for the world we're gonna make"


We can live in a world that we design, but we have to be able to dream. We have to picture what the world could be. It takes an imagination. But in the hustle of the world around us, we get lost in the noise, it drowns out our thoughts and pushes us along. Silence is necessary. Give yourself time away from people and away from music. Make it so that you can hear yourself think. And you will cultivate imagination. Give yourself the time to dream. Clear your head of the clamor surrounding you. Even if you’re extroverted and need to be around people, silence and time alone is a good thing. It lets you think and reflect on things.


So now you know that I’m an introvert. For me, being alone sometimes is necessary. Silence is golden. It’s hard to find, but it’s valuable. It helps us think and dream of what the world could be. We need to turn off the noise. Get away from the distractions and clamor of the world around us. And let the silence envelop us.