The Sound Of Silence

I recently spent two weeks with my family in Downeast Maine and woke before dawn one morning to the sound of nothing - no clocks - no refrigerator compressor - no computer fan - no cars - no planes - in short, 'dead silence'. As I lay in bed listening to virtually nothing, I began to wonder about what we hear when we hear nothing - do we hear our body mechanisms running - do we tune in to our inner rhythms - or, do we try to fill in the silence, because it might be too scary to listen only to ourselves.

Several days after returning home, I happened to see two teenage girls walking together, each independently listening to her own headphones on her own iPOD. I wondered why they were together, as each girl had no apparent connection to the other, except in walking side by side. I wondered if they had consciously decided not to communicate or maybe that was the message - they had nothing to say to one another.

I'm not the first to wonder in which direction the art of conversation might be headed. But, in a world of 140 character limits, text abbreviations, and emoticons, maybe the sound of silence is the coming thing.