‘Silence is Golden,’ goes the proverb. Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing, calls it ‘The perfectest herald of joy … I were but little happy, if I could say how much’. And Hamlet, at the end of his tortured journey, declares, ‘The rest is silence.’
One of the fruits of meditation is that we become less prone to impose our own ideas and more aware that, just as there is a time to speak, so there is also a time to be silent. The media is awash with words, so that one is reminded of T S Eliot’s question: ‘Where is the wisdom that has been lost in knowledge, and where is the knowledge that has been lost in information?’ One of the great joys of a deeply committed relationship with another human being is when neither feels the need to speak, but is simply content to rest in the deep silence of love.
