After more than fifty years of experiencing life’s ups and downs, I have finally come to understand the profound importance of quieting down, reflecting, and learning how to truly love myself. It is only through self-love that we can genuinely love others.
“When I truly began to love myself, I started going to bed earlier and learned to enjoy exercise. I stopped getting lost in worries and anxieties. Instead, I became confident and pursued meaningful people and endeavors with passion. That was the moment my life truly began.”
Understanding another person is never easy. We must walk in their shoes, see the world through their eyes, and consider life from their perspective. Yet, this journey often brings sadness. But in that sadness, we discover clarity—we learn to focus on what truly matters.
Rather than wasting our time on trivial concerns and unfulfilling distractions, we should devote ourselves to nourishing pursuits: sleep, books, exercise, the beauty of nature, and, above all, the love we have for the world. When we consciously take control of our time, the tranquility of daily life emerges naturally, and anxiety fades away.
Kahlil Gibran once said, “If one day you stop searching for love and simply love; stop yearning for success and just do; stop pursuing empty growth and begin to cultivate your character, then your life will truly begin.” This wisdom reminds us that authentic living starts with our inner transformation.
Loving yourself means understanding that pain and emotional turmoil are often just reminders to live authentically. Unless it stems from physical illness, much of our suffering comes from misplaced values rather than objective reality. The things we cling to the most are often the very things that torment us, while those beyond our control are simply not worth our distress. True wisdom lies in knowing when to hold on and when to let go.
To be nurtured by others is a gift; to nurture others is an even greater act of cultivation.
May we have eyes that shine like stars, hearts as vast as the ocean, and lives that leave behind the fragrance of kindness wherever we go.
The Wisdom of Middle Age
Middle age teaches us the value of patience, restraint, and measured action. In our youth, we often equate eloquence with intelligence, only to later realize that true wisdom often lies in silence. As W. Somerset Maugham observed, “In a crowd, the quietest person is often the most powerful.”
In conversations, we should not rush to take center stage. Instead, we should listen more and speak less, exercising the grace of restraint. When others share, let us resist the urge to interrupt. When disagreements arise, let us not hastily refute. Instead of saying, “I think,” we can ask, “What do you think?” Instead of declaring, “You are wrong,” we can offer, “Perhaps there is another way to see this.” By replacing subjective judgment with open-minded awareness, we foster deeper understanding.
The world is not simply black and white. By speaking a beat slower and thinking a step faster, we cultivate clarity and wisdom in our lives.
In psychology, there is a concept called task separation: our emotions are our responsibility, while others’ reactions belong to them. The wisdom of softness lies in maintaining a gentle boundary between the two. It allows us to be vulnerable and to accept imperfection in ourselves and others. Harsh confrontation often leads to conflict, but a simple, “I understand your difficulties,” can resolve tensions effortlessly. As Alfred Adler wisely said, “True strength lies in the courage to expose one’s vulnerabilities.”
Try shifting from “I must win” to “We can solve this together.” Instead of “Why don’t you understand me?” consider, “Perhaps I need to express myself differently.” Softness is not weakness—it is a space that allows relationships to breathe and grow.
Kazuo Inamori once said, “What you hold in your heart is what you will encounter.” True generosity is not about calculated acts of kindness but instinctive goodwill. A small gesture—carrying a neighbor’s trash, offering a sincere compliment, or leaving a light on for a loved one—creates ripples that spread far beyond our immediate reach.
A generous heart does not tally whether kindness is repaid. As the Tao Te Ching states, “The more you give to others, the more you have yourself.” Every act of warmth we extend ultimately enriches our own lives.
As we journey through middle age, wisdom is cultivated through restraint. In youth, we may be like strong liquor—bold and fiery; with time, we become like fine tea—subtle yet deeply enriching. Speaking slowly allows us to reflect, gentleness fosters harmonious relationships, and generosity ensures lasting blessings.
These qualities of slow cultivation cannot be rushed or feigned. But with daily practice and yearly dedication, we will come to embody the depth of the old adage: “Still waters run deep.”
In China, there’s a saying that goes, “Disaster comes from the mouth, and illness enters from the mouth.” This saying serves as a reminder for people to exercise caution with their words. In Chinese traditional culture, there’s an even stronger emphasis on encouraging individuals to avoid engaging in arguments as much as possible. Confucius’s Analects even contain the proverb “Silence is golden.” The traditional Taoist concept in China emphasizes achieving ultimate emptiness and upholding tranquility and dedication. In Buddhism, there’s also the story of Vimalakirti’s profound silence. While I used to think that these ideas were exclusive to Chinese culture, I later discovered that a similar perspective exists in Western culture as well.
In his timeless masterpiece “The 48 Laws of Power,” Robert Greene delves into the art of navigating complex human interactions to achieve personal and professional success. Amid the book’s numerous valuable insights, the power of silence stands out as a potent tool that often goes unnoticed. Embracing silence can be challenging in our fast-paced, noisy world, but it offers unique advantages that can significantly impact our lives. Let’s explore five key benefits of practicing silence as outlined in “The 48 Laws of Power.”
Cultivating Mystery and Intrigue:
In the realm of power and influence, excessive verbosity can lay bare your intentions and vulnerabilities. In contrast, silence exudes an aura of mystery and intrigue. By listening more and speaking less, people become curious about your thoughts and motivations. Practicing strategic silence creates an impression of wisdom and depth that captures others’ attention, rendering them more receptive to your words when you choose to speak.
Exerting Control Over Emotional Responses:
Our emotions frequently lead us astray, prompting impulsive and regrettable actions. Through silence, you gain mastery over your emotional reactions. By pausing and observing your feelings without immediate response, you grant yourself the space to process and rationalize, resulting in more thoughtful and measured reactions. This controlled demeanor projects strength and stability, fostering an air of authority and respect.
Revealing Concealed Motives:
In a world rife with deception and manipulation, silence can be a potent ally in exposing others’ true intentions. Your silence creates a void that others may attempt to fill with their words. In this process, people often unveil their motives, vulnerabilities, and secrets, affording you invaluable insight into their genuine character. The ability to discern hidden agendas bestows a significant advantage in any situation.
Promoting Attentive Listening and Learning:
In the era of ceaseless chatter and information overload, the art of listening has faded. Embracing silence allows you to become a more attentive and empathetic listener. Active listening enables you to gather vital information, identify valuable opportunities, and comprehend the needs of those around you. This heightened understanding empowers you to tailor your actions and words to suit diverse situations, enhancing relationships and augmenting your influence.
Mastery of Strategic Timing:
Silence is a formidable instrument for mastering the art of timing, particularly when dealing with sensitive or contentious matters. Selecting the appropriate moment to speak or act can profoundly impact the outcome of a situation. Silence grants you the ability to observe the rhythm of events, enabling well-calculated decisions that can profoundly affect your success.
By nurturing enigma, exercising emotional restraint, exposing hidden motives, fostering attentive listening, and mastering the art of timing, you can harness the power of silence to your advantage. Integrating these principles into your daily life will unveil newfound strength, resilience, and influence, propelling you toward success in both personal and professional pursuits. Remember, sometimes, less truly is more, and silence can speak volumes in a world saturated with noise.
The modern world has a curious way of stripping something away and then selling it back to us at a premium. Or, to put it another way, of transforming formerly public goods into a private luxuries. I’m sure you can think of any number of cases. Take darkness, for example. Over the course of one hundred years or so we conquered the night and banished the starry hosts. Only recently have we discovered that if we now want to experience natural darkness and behold the Milky Way we might have to pay for it. Dark Sky tourism is one of the most popular trends in tourism. Adequate or healthy levels of physical activity serves as another example. A monthly gym or CrossFit membership supplies what might have been achieved as a matter of course while completing one’s ordinary daily work.
Silence is yet another example. The World Health Organization recently updated its noise pollution guidelines. The report, focused on European nations, claims that one in five Europeans is exposed to noise levels with adverse health effects, including high blood pressure, heart disease, and the risk of cognitive impairment for children. The report went so far as to classify noise pollution one of the “top environmental risks to health.” Naturally, those who are sufficiently resourced can now turn to one of the growing number of luxury resorts whose main selling point is silence. In 2017, Alex Glasscock, CEO and founder of The Ranch in Malibu told Condé Nast Traveler, “A calm and silent mind is the new luxury and people are actively seeking this opportunity.” And intrepid entrepreneurs are willing to supply the opportunity at a hefty price. A four-day stay at the Ranch, its cheapest offering, will run you $4200. Alternatively, you could buy $350 noise-cancelling headphones.
How exactly does this happen? How do public goods turn into private luxuries? The story, as we might imagine, is rather complicated. From one perspective, it is merely the ordinary operations of capital. But it may be worth asking why it proves so difficult to resist these operations. It is possible to suppose that the goods were not recognized as such until they were lost, that they were not framed as goods until they were threatened. Indeed, this is almost certainly part of the answer. It is easy to see how darkness, bodily activity, and silence would be taken for granted. Moreover, it is easy to see how they might even be construed as problems to be overcome. Darkness limits our work, bodily activity can be wearisome and slavish, and silence can be a symptom of loneliness and isolation. Consequently, we embrace the technologies that allow us to work and play into the night, relieve us of our wearisome labor, and fill or silences.
William Cronon argued along similar lines several years ago with respect to the idea of “the wilderness” in American history. Regarding the idea of the wilderness, Cronon writes, “Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history.” During the turn of the nineteenth century, the wilderness was theorized as the sublime and the frontier. As industrial technologies expanded and altered the shape and pace of urban life, “the wilderness” appeared in a new light. It was no longer a foreboding and threatening space; it was now a hallowed and treasured place. And, strikingly, Cronon also reminds us that at this point “Wilderness suddenly emerged as the landscape of choice for elite tourists.”
I would suggest, however, that the story is slightly more complicated than this. Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that ethics lost its way when it lost its telos. Traditionally, ethics was conceived of as the bridge between “man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature.” Ethical prescriptions only made sense within this tripartite structure. In MacIntyre’s view, modern ethical theories amounted to one failed effort after another to do ethics without some normative understanding of “man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature.” Under these circumstances, ethical rules and principles were no longer coherent or compelling. They had, in short, lost their story.
This is not a bad way of understanding what happened to a whole class of goods that includes silence but also things like solitude, attention, and privacy. Once they were disembedded from a socio-moral context from which they derived their taken-for-granted value—once they lost their story—they became easy prey for the emerging technological and economic milieu. Within this context, any attempt to conserve these goods tends to appear reactionary or nostalgic. Worse yet, as the examples with which we began suggest, such efforts do little more than return these goods to us as commodities.
It is with these considerations in mind that I took up Robert Cardinal Sarah’s 2016 book, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise. The work, first published in French, appeared in English in 2017. The book is structured as a long interview or conversation with the French journalist, Nicolas Diat, who previously collaborated with Cardinal Sarah on an earlier book God or Nothing.
Cardinal Sarah was appointed bishop by John Paul II in 1979 and, in 2010, Benedict XVI made him a cardinal. He is Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Most notably for our purposes, he was born in 1945 in rural French Guinea. This is notable because it places Cardinal Sarah at a decided advantage when it comes to the question of silence: his sensibilities and insights have been cultivated in a non-Western context. He is able to speak about silence in a manner that is not captive to the patterns outlined above. Silence is not a commodity or lifestyle hack he’s selling. It is a good that remains integrated into a coherent and compelling understanding of human flourishing. “In Africa,” as the cardinal puts it, “the sacred is something quite obvious for the Christian people, but also for believers of all religions.”
The Power of Silence is a rich repository of writings, ancient and modern, from the fathers to Blaise Pascal to Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen. What emerges from the cardinal’s weaving of these theological resources and his own insights is an expansive understanding of what constitutes silence, one which, not surprisingly, often touches on the mystical. “It is not enough to be quiet,” Cardinal Sarah tells us, “It is necessary to become silence.”
Silence, we are reminded, describes both external and internal realities. Silence is as much a condition of the soul as it is the absence of auditory stimuli. It describes a state of “interior rest and harmony.” Silence, as Cardinal Sarah understands it, is not unlike that state of the soul characterized by leisure described by another Catholic theologian, Josef Pieper: “a form of that stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still cannot hear.”
Yet, “it is absurd to speak about interior silence without exterior silence.” Silence, then, involves the absence of noise, but noise is not merely what we perceive with our ears: noise, like silence, is also a condition of the soul. It is a state of perpetually harried restlessness. Moreover, silence is a deeply personal reality, but also the foundation of our right relation to others: “Without the capacity for silence, man is incapable of hearing, loving, and understanding the people around him. Charity is born of silence.”
Most importantly, silence is the condition for our hearing the voice of God and it is the voice of God. Silence is not merely a matter of finding personal peace and well-being. It is a requisite condition of our knowing God, for which knowledge we have been made. To participate in the silence of God, then, a silence that dwells within us, is an indispensable element of our becoming the sorts of creatures we have been created to be. “Silence is not an absence,” Sarah explains. “On the contrary, it is the manifestation of a presence, the most intense of all presences.” “The desire to see God is what urges us to love solitude and silence,” Sarah observes, “For silence is where God dwells. He drapes himself in silence.”
Opposed to the life characterized by silence, however, we find what Cardinal Sarah called “the dictatorship of noise.” This dictatorship is characterized by the tools at its disposal. He describes the regime of noise as a “highly technological society” and warns us of “the glowing screens” that “need a gargantuan diet in order to distract mankind and destroy consciences.” This world is marked, as the German scholar Harmut Rosa, has argued by social acceleration. “The experience of modernization,” Rosa argues, “is an experience of acceleration.” By this he means an acceleration of the pace of social change and an acceleration of the experience of time by modern individuals. Just as Cardinal Sarah understands that noise is not merely auditory stimuli, Rosa understands that acceleration is not only about the speed at which we experience life. It is also a matter of frenzied and frenetic activity, which makes it difficult to get one’s bearings or to make sense of one’s own personal history.
The cardinal also understands, however, that there are also deeper issues at play. “Without noise,” he writes, “postmodern man falls into a dull, insistent uneasiness.” This line recalls the thinking of Blaise Pascal, who Cardinal Sarah frequently cites throughout The Power of Silence. Pascal knew that the turn to diversions to help us cope with our inability to abide silence was the symptom of the malaise at the heart of the human condition. But Pascal could still speak about silence, or what he frequently called rest, as a good with a view to an ultimate end—understanding our predicament as a step toward recognizing our dependence on God’s grace.
Cardinal Sarah has written a moving book. He circles around the same basic principles and themes repeatedly, which does generate a mild redundancy. And at times, his efforts to put words to what must finally be a wordless experience fall rather flat, or perhaps that is a matter of translation. But he succeeds in giving silence a story within which it can achieve its value independently of the dynamics which have rendered it a private luxury. But even if we recognize the value of silence, we still face the dictatorship of noise. We will stand a better chance of securing a measure of silence to sustain our spiritual lives if our efforts unfold alongside others who seek silence with us. The dictatorship of noise is best combatted not by individuals but by communities of practice which prioritize silence and a well-ordered life.
Peace LiLy 