The silence that spoke volumes

I took my car and drove in the middle of traffic to be near my daughter. The hospital was like most New York hospitals I have seen: overcrowded, noisy, modest, filled with a very diverse population. When I finally made it to the Emergency Room, and after the security screening a nurse walked me through aisles full of patients and expecting relatives. She told me she was in bed #1272B.  I was reading the numbered signs above each closed curtain, but I could not see hers.  The girl perceived my confusion and walked me to a printed sign beside the nurse station. “Here she is, ” she said without a trace of any apologetic tone.

Her bed was leaning over the side of the nurse station, a chair stuck on its foot and an IV placed behind her to avoid any of the patients or medical staff from tripping with it while they walk the narrow hall. I sat down on the chair and proceeded to ask the expected questions and offer my love and compassion.  Bed #1272B offered no privacy. However, it did give me a frontal view of the gigantic screen where a spreadsheet showed the name and status of each of the thirty patients who were admitted at the time. More than half of those had Hispanic names. 

The medical staff was as diverse as the population it served. An Indian doctor was speaking Spanish to the Dominican family that was accompanying the toddler they had brought. Behind the curtains in front of us was a tween girl screaming because she did not want to be tested for the flu, and in between screams she started throwing up.  

When I got tired of making out stories of why each patient was there, I read, and then I wrote. But nothing like an impatient person who dislikes hospitals (thank you, mom and dad, for not transferring me your genes) who needs an excuse to ward off the worries.  So I closed my eyes, trying to meditate. I didn’t make it to my third breathing cycle.  The doctor had come to say they needed another test. Breathing in, breathing out again.  Soon after, I started noticing all of the noises: breathing machines, babies screaming, doctors on phone calls, beeping machines, IVs running out, and nurses discussing cases.  Alarms went off in a diagonal room. A baby was crying, his temperature was 105, and his breathing was slow. The mother was also crying, and that f….loud machine would not stop. Another machine started beeping in the opposite corner. Nurses ran in and out of the ER rooms.  How to remain calm? How could the nurses still smile whenever they came to check on my daughter, even throwing jokes at her?  How could they discern what alarms were greater priorities? How could they really listen when there was a dissonant symphony of cries and beeps going on at high volumes?

The irony of it did not get lost on me.  Where would the firefighters go if 80% of fire alarms in our area went off at the same time? An alarm can only startle us when it is isolated. When they echo, the response time gets affected.

In the middle of all the noises, I only craved one thing- two counting my daughter’s health. I craved silence.

“Close the door of words

that the window of your heart may open.

To see what cannot be seen

turn your eyes inward

and listen, in silence.”

— Rumi

Humans, by nature, are afraid of silence. We filled our life with noises: the TV is on, Spotify is in the background, and Instagram stories play videos in a loop.  As humans, we really suck at staying quiet because when there is an absence of sound, an alarm goes off inevitably: the truth. We don’t want quietude because that forces us to listen to the naked truths. And sometimes the veracity that is cradled by silence can’t be unheard. And that is a very scary thing. Or a wonderful thing, depending on how we decide to look at it. 

When there are no words sounding off like distracting alarms, we can embrace the full healing effect of silence. If we listen with our hearts and our intentions, even the hardest truths come cushioned with peace. But there is no peace when we insist on covering them with more words, especially those of our internal voices and anxious brains.  How many times have we been quiet next to someone, and we are filled with a sense of certainty that we can’t explain? How often can we lose our words looking at a baby's sleep and feel the most inexplicable bliss? And what about the times we stand in front of a sunrise and our voices go on a temporary retirement? 

When we are silent, we can hear our soul, we can hear the universe sending us a thousand messages, and we can feel pure joy or sorrow. We can be fully alive.  No need to become silent monks. No need to cut our tongues. Silence offers its healing benefits at even the smallest doses.

Most importantly, how would we recognize our alarms if we don’t stay quiet? How do we become our own nurses?  

The problem with not having moments of quietness is that we start becoming numb to the noise, and like everything that is bad for us, we start believing we can’t live without it. We become the patient in the bed next to the nurse station, unable to leave despite all the chaos around us. Even when life sounds all our emergency alarms, we will not hear them.

I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but I can speak for myself.  I have heard silence scream truths, and I have heard words spread lies.  And I can be wrong many times, of course, but the first one usually brings me the most peace. And that is what I am after. No loud beeping alarm, breathing machines, or emergency calls on the speakers. May the lack of words lead me to that place where the sun is the only spectacle that I need, only the sound of my breath and giggly, content soul. And to prove my point, I have not shut up talking about silence; more than a thousand words were needed to clarify my thoughts. I keep doing it, and I will do it repeatedly because the problem with staying quiet is that once the truth has been baited, there is only one way to bring it up, and it is reeling it to the surface.

After all, it seems that Emergency Department healed me as well.