Integrate!

Silence doesn't sound scary while you're looking at a photo of a path through the woods. Primed by this photo, you are likely to imagine silence as calming or peaceful.  In the middle of an important conversation, this may not be your first reaction to silence. Most often, when we say something significant and get silence in reply, we are rattled. Silence is not processed as calming; it's processed as a warning. The quieter it is outside, the more alarms go off in our brains. "Danger!" Is silence always a bad sign? Probably not.  Think of a time when someone said something and your reaction was "I need to process this." The time when you were processing was best spent in silence (processing out loud is not always a good idea, even for extraverts). This processing time could have been used to do many things: to understand; to tease out an association at the edge of your awareness; to think several jumps ahead; or to disagree. Disagreement...

There are lots of sexy gifts that we wish we had: wisdom, charisma, strength or acuity.  They are characteristics of the successful and powerful, the characteristics we associate with being better and doing better.  Persistence is not sexy. Courage is sexier than persistence. We admire courage although if we are wise and honest, we hope that we won't need courage very much or very often. Courage is a gift that means you're in big trouble and it will probably hurt before it gets better. Courage is sometimes so like persistence that they might be twins. Persistence is the quiet twin, the one who knows how to make herself inconspicuous when the company arrives. She is often found with her equally undesirable cousin, Patience.  The two are hard to notice and yet, when we look we find them both wherever people are able to maintain success. You might be lucky once, but if you are lucky repeatedly, it's because you have made room for persistence. I think if I were a fairy ...

Silence is an interesting phenomenon in a conversation. It's a sort of keystone: everything else leans on the silence and changes according to its quality.  We teach people something of how to talk and sometimes even something of how to listen, but there is no teaching on how to be silent together. Silence is either the most excruciatingly awkward thing that can happen to a conversation or the sign that the conversation is deep and wide and wonderful. And we shy away from both. We shy away from the wonderful conversations because we are not sure what can measure up to the moments of full, rich silence or because we are afraid that the silence will ring so clear that we will reveal something, somehow, that we didn't mean to reveal. We are afraid because change happens in the silence. And yet, it's the fear at the top of the roller coaster, the fear of taking the first step onto stage, the fear before the whistle blows and the game begins. The fear that is also a hope tha...