Recently, I watched an Irish movie called The Quiet Girl about a girl in a rather dysfunctional family who goes for a time to live with a kindly older couple. In one scene, where, typically, she does not respond to the older man's question, he says, "You don't have to say anything. Always remember that. Many's the person missed the opportunity to say nothing, and lost much because of it."
I kept returning to that moment again and again, for his words spoke of the right to be silent, and the value of being silent, something I was often as a child criticised for. I have always longed to simply be, without feeling any need to satisfy someone else's desire for conversation, or the social expectations I put upon myself.
A solitary, generally quiet and unsocial child, I nevertheless eventually learned to speak up, speak out and become thoroughly socialised, for that is what the world and later, my family, expected of me. Becoming more outwardly verbal, however, disconnected me from the inner voices, the intuitions that arose to guide me. So many misjudgement, wrong decisions, so many errors that might have been avoided.
I am weary of that, and now in my later years, I am quiet again. It disturbs people sometimes, especially family, who expect me to help fight their battles, have strong opinions, to be amusing, clever or whatever else I used to be, but I am weary of being an extrovert.
The real me finds silence, withdrawal, introspection so much easier, so much less of a strain on my energies, more liberating. The more I breathe into each moment, sink into myself, the more spacious my inner world - the whole world, in fact - becomes for me. And in that spaciousness, my long-ignored intuitive self can be heard. And I listen. More and more, I listen to it, rather than to the ego chatter of shoulds and opinions, and as much as I love them, to the expectations of those around me.
Sometimes, I do go too far. It is a secret indulgence