We tend to think of silence as the absence of something: noise, interruption, company. I have come to think of it as infrastructure, something you build, like a road, so that other things can travel along it.
My own silence is ordinary. An hour in the morning before anything is switched on. A rule that the phone does not enter the bedroom. A Sunday afternoon with no plans. None of it is dramatic and none of it is a retreat; it is simply a set of margins kept deliberately clear.
What I notice is how much of my good work happens in the margins. The idea that settles the argument, the decision I was avoiding, the apology I finally know how to word: these all arrived in silence, as though the road had been waiting for them.
Protect the road. You will not always know what will travel on it.
