I'm aware that I have not blogged for a few weeks now. Sometimes it  bothers me. Why? I mean (no offence to anyone reading this) but it's not as if millions hang on my every word!

Perhaps it's I fear being seen to be silent.

Silence, or empty space, generally things we are not comfortable with.

We try to fill them.

Fill them with words, thoughts and actions.

But maybe all that was needed was the silence and the space.

Stanley Hauerwas, after 9/11, writes about how the initial response to events in New York was simply one of silence, one of shock. The was a numbness, no one knew what to say or do.

Equally wonderful events can do the same to us, anything from a gorgeous sunset to a new life. We simply don't know what to say.

For a time that is.

And then we fill the silence, we shatter it, trying to take control, to explain, to justify, to reason away.

Where silence was appropriate our words and actions come flooding in.

Probably because we fear the silence.

It makes us realise that we are not in charge, it makes us realise that sometimes life is too wonderful for words...
 
and sometimes life is just plain £%?!.

But we can't handle that, so we talk and talk and talk. And we act and act and act.

And somewhere in all our noise something gets lost.