Deafening Silence

It has been said that silence can be deafening. I understand how this thought came about. Because silence says nothing, we are forced to fill it with everything. People cannot live without everything having meaning. This stands to reason since there is indeed some reason for everything. Whether something happens because of chance or intent, there is a reason. When something happens that we don't know about or can't understand, we simply can't assign it no meaning whatsoever and move on with our lives.

You can see this basic human need from the earliest of civilizations. The gods of myth were created because we needed a reason for the weather, and other natural occurrences. Our need for that has lessened as we have science to fall back on. Of course the natural world is easy these days. What can still elude us more than anything else is the most mysterious thing on Earth: People. Few people in the world even strive to understand themselves, let alone succeed, so when the need arises to understand someone else, we fall short. We have only two sources of information to add meaning to what someone else does: Our own experiences, and their own words. Often times even when we hear their words, we have to check it to our experiences. But this is still relatively easy to do.

Silence kills us. Without their own reasoning behind it, we have to use our imagination to make up a reason that someone does something. This fills our minds with all kinds of things, and I would venture to say that the majority of them are negative. Our mind becomes filled with possibilities, prophesies of doom, and of course the inevitable doubting (because of course you can't be sure of your own decision when there is nothing to base it off of). Ha! Deafening indeed.