The Noise of the Crowd

It’s hard to find silence these days. The noise of the crowd follows us through our screens, almost ubiquitous in the modern age. Even the pauses get filled. A spare minute becomes a glance at a screen, another voice, another opinion. We can spend a whole day taking in words without hearing what we want to say. The noise deafens us to ourselves.

Nascent dreams are allergic to doubts. It’s hard to share an idea and not have it get extinguished by other people who don’t share the vision. Visions are hard to see, and there are some people who will never see. Sharing an idea too early can turn discovery into defense. You’re still trying to understand what you see, and suddenly you’re explaining why it deserves to exist. Other people’s doubts can become your own.

Creativity resides in the silence and peace of solitude. We are creative when we are silent. Silence gives a nascent dream time to take shape. We can stay with an idea, follow it, begin to understand what drew us to it.

The Quiet Page.

And we release that creativity through our words. Sometimes we don’t fully know what we’ve been carrying until we put it into words. Writing gives the vision a shape, even for the person who first sensed it.

It’s important that we hear ourselves. The point of our lives is to be ourselves. We need time to recognize which desires are ours and which we’ve absorbed from other people. We can become so practiced at responding to everyone else that we lose touch with what matters to us.

How can we know how we feel, what we want, what to do, if we can never tune into that still, small voice crying out from inside of us?