Nonverbal Communication and the Power of Silence

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

A few weeks ago, we had a conversation about monastic orders that developed their own sign language because they weren’t allowed to talk.

And that prompted a fascinating email about the power of silence.

It’s from Cameron Brick. He’s originally from California, but now lives in the Netherlands,

Where he’s assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Amsterdam.

He writes,

Not rehearsing a response. Even when we’re silent in a movie or lecture, we’re still rehearsing.

It took five or so days for this to calm down and be replaced by a smooth, still lake of more

Complete listening. At about 30 years old, I went on a silent backpacking trip with my girlfriend.

It went fine, we heard more birds, and we wrote in a notebook when we needed to communicate.

One dusky night, sitting outside of the tent, I realized my feet were covered in mosquitoes.

I’m particularly allergic to the bites, so I knew that I had 20 minutes of agony coming up.

If I’d been able to talk, I would have started complaining and kept it up for a while.

Not being able to talk, this instinct was thwarted, and I just had to sit there and accept that it was happening.

It was too much work to go to the tent, get the headlamp, get the notebook, write down my complaint.

To my surprise, this inability to talk dramatically lessened the discomfort.

I think we don’t always realize how language can also reinforce our suffering,

Maybe especially when we’re lost in a narrative of deservingness.

And Grant, then he goes on to talk about the old Buddhist parable about the second arrow,

That any time we suffer, two arrows fly our way.

And in life, you can’t always control the first arrow, but your reaction to the second arrow is optional.

How you react to your suffering.

And I just thought that was such a fascinating letter.

It is. It’s so true.

I did nothing quite as extensive as his moments of silence or his times of silence,

But I did a day-long silent retreat as part of a mindfulness course.

And I didn’t have quite the experience that he did,

But sitting on a college campus, silent.

No phone, no watch, no book, no radio, nobody else just sitting there is freeing.

And not just because you don’t have responsibilities for that moment, but you don’t find yourself, like he said, preparing.

And you don’t find yourself arguing with other people in your mind.

That’s a lot of what is happening.

You are doing a lot of role-playing these what-if scenarios.

What if this person next to me wants to do X?

Well, what am I going to say?

So some of the mental load that you’re carrying doesn’t have to be carried.

You know, we’re preparing these conversations that don’t need to take place.

We can have them.

We can have these conversations at the time they’re necessary and not before then.

You know, that’s so interesting because you were talking about the experience of sitting there with no phone and nobody to talk to.

And I was preparing for what you were going to say.

Well, you are in radio.

Yeah.

And the last word I expected to hear you say was freeing.

I thought you were going to say it was so frustrating.

But freeing, that’s so interesting.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it reminds me of what an improv teacher once told our class about the need to just go on stage without preparing anything,

Just to have a mind like water.

And you go out there with a mind like water and it’s affected by what’s around you.

But you don’t come with anything prepared and magic can happen then.

Yeah, the ripples of water aren’t there until the thing enters the water.

Exactly.

Whether it’s moonlight or a pebble.

So thanks, Cameron Brick, for that wonderfully thoughtful email.

Martha, this is a great conversation.

And I’m hoping our listeners will chime in with a lot more of their ideas about making silence in the hubbub of daily conversations.

You can email us words@waywordradio.org

Or tell us on Twitter what you’ve been reading along these lines @wayword.