Quiet Places

Alone

It is undoubtedly in the quiet places that we are the most honest with ourselves. It is in the quiet places that we lose ourselves, we find ourselves, and we step into ourselves. It is a big step, I know, you have to gather yourself up from wherever you were, pull your energy back from whoever you were with, and swim in it. Drown in it. Because of this, people become codependent. They see themselves standing alone in a quiet place and they don’t like what they see, they don’t like what they will think. They don’t want to be alone, it’s too overwhelming a thought. So they deny it, wholeheartedly.

Contrary to prior belief, quiet places are the most dangerous places to be. You are never truly alone, you’re surrounded by your imagination, your memories, and your thoughts. You’re all too aware of your position in life, your doubts, your flaws, your losses, your future. You tend to fall into a perpetual pattern of beating yourself up. You capitalize on all the wrong things, and you think about the world, and that scares you. That scares everyone. Because more than anything, everything is unknown. The thing about quiet places is that once there, people can’t impair your judgment anymore. You are completely and utterly yours to think about everything in a way that you haven’t in a while. And some people need that.

Sometimes the silence hits people just right and they cry, freely, because for some reason they had it engraved inside that crying in public is not socially acceptable. They had their minds made up that they can only release strong emotions in private. And that is where the quiet places arise. The quiet places belong to those who need to use their voices for a bit. They belong to those who need them to move on with their days, with their weeks and years. They are transition periods for humans because being human is expressing emotion, and overthinking everything, and because being human is exhausting.

Anywhere

It doesn’t matter where the quiet place exists. You can stick yourself into your mind anywhere. I can only tell you that once you leave, and the moments slip into a comfortable past, you will hope to find more. Something about the feeling, something about the cool air, or something about the lights or the view, will have a slight hold on you. In many ways, you can feel life, the pulse of the Earth, and you no longer have to identify yourself as one thing. You can be whatever you want, you can unmask. You will develop a subtle addiction to being in that state. It is a peacefulness your body probably forgot it could have. That is the danger. It’s comforting. Because some people, who have mastered the lonely existence of the quiet place, can escape themselves, and reality. They can fall into the murmurous and uninflected voice of these places, and it makes them feel as though they are sliding out from underneath the crushing mass of the universe.

I guess the most attractive factor of a place of this magnitude is the simplicity theoretically underpinning it. When everything is consumingly complex, you can rely on these places to provide something light, and still. They can cure a multitude of ills simply by existing. Quiet places are reliable in this way. They are much more reliable than people. They don’t wander off, they don’t leave, and they certainly don’t disappoint you. However, there could be a time, in the hovering of all the life in the world, that you find someone in a place like this, and learn to share in the silence with them.