Silence or Clatter – What The Heart Wants?

I look at the world around me, at the happy faces, at the sad visages, at the people indulging in amiable conversations, at the ones exchanging heated arguments, at the ones who are simply lost. I, then, ruminate over my life, think of it in all possible directions, in every imaginable dimension and I arrive at the conclusion – I am tired. I am tired of doing so much of talking and blabbering. The fatigue is so immense that even mincing words in the mouth and a soft whisper feels exhausting. It presses me – the compulsion to talk even when I least want to do it. Silence descends over me and my soul craves solitude. It is not because I am depressed, not because I have given up on myself, not because I am terrified of the world and its happenings, not because I am an astray bird and definitely not because I have been cornered or left in the lurch. Sometimes, your inner being demands to be alone. You see, it wants to be alone but not lonely. Words hurt, too many thoughts hurt, the headaches, the heartaches, and each bone of yours just wants to relax. It is tired of handling different matters in hand, it is tired of wearing a plastered smile, it is tired of responding to every call, it is tired of acting.

After a certain period of this silence, it starts to prick me. I wouldn’t even realize and that much needed, that much-desired silence overwhelms me. It will start crawling over me, it will beat the shit out of me. In no time, I will find myself wanting to talk! Yeah, the words which I pushed back at some nook of my mind want to come out. They will be brimming my body, they will be flooding my head. The pool of thoughts would want an outlet to vent. And I, surprisingly, would crave the clatter even more.

I find myself oscillating between the two extremes – to talk and to stay calm. At one point, I want to act and at other, I wish to simply observe. On one hand, I want to bury myself under the debris of silence and on the other hand, I want to dig and bring myself to the fore. This constant swaying of mind is baffling. It seems as if the two very different states of mind are juxtaposed to leave very little space between them. In a jiffy, there’s this unexpected switch and lo! I have changed. This oddity of my behavior has always irked me more than others. Things like these disturb your mental equilibrium and you find yourself grappling with your mental state. As I furthered my observance experimenting on different people, I found that all of us are designed the same way. This peculiarity, this weird behavior of ours is not unique. It is something that we share with our fellow beings equally. Somewhere beneath our skins, we all have the same chemical composition and somewhat same machinery that operates us and commands our general behavior. We all pine to shut ourselves in our shells. We all desire strongly to open up ourselves to the world. We all want to keep a few affairs to ourselves. And yet we all want to be heard and listened. And this pandemonium in our behavioral mechanics affects all of us in equal measure!

 

Find me on Quora:

https://www.quora.com/profile/Khyati-Gautam

Find me on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/khyati_gautam