As I get older, the more I cherish silence. It is rare, and when it does occur, many have forgotten how to endure it. Silence is equated with emptiness and fought against as if it were deadly. Yet, in silence, much can arise because the mind finally gets a bit of freedom, and imagination can run wild again.

As a teenager, I loved the hustle and bustle; the louder, the better. Over time, I realized how difficult it is to find silence. Even in the forest, where there are only natural sounds that can be quite loud themselves, an airplane suddenly flies over, and then another one. For years, there was wonderful silence while swimming. Underwater, while doing the crawl, there were water sounds, but a silence that let thoughts roam freely. Then headphones were invented that could be used underwater, and now I belong to the minority of swimmers who prefer the water’s silence to the music from headphones while swimming.

At home, despite triple glazing and all possible technical gimmicks, absolute silence does not exist. Only in the house in the middle of the forest, where I escape the hot summer days, does it exist. At three in the morning, when the wind is still, when the cicadas have finished their concert and the birds have not yet risen, there is silence without any sound. As a child, it seemed eerie to me; now I perceive it as gentle security – the surroundings say: Everything is alright, sleep on! But woe betide if one of the 200-year-old beams in the house groans! It is actually quiet, but in this silence, it sounds like a motorcycle starting up, so great is the contrast to the prevailing noiseless calm.

It reminds me of a story where I feared the silence. Many years ago, I went sledding with my then five-year-old daughter on a Sunday afternoon. It was January, a sunny day, but cold. In the afternoon, as we both were tired and the day began to darken, I took her to a nearby church for an organ concert. The church was almost empty. There were maybe ten of us. The music was powerful, mighty, and physically penetrating. We sat next to each other on the pew, and my daughter laid her head on my lap and fell asleep. She was still small, and we had done a lot that day. I stroked her hair and let her sleep. How lovely to fall asleep to Bach organ music. She began to snore. That wasn’t a problem because the organ was so loud that no one noticed. But there were those very short breaks between parts, where even the very last tone of the organ died away, and absolute silence returned. My little angel’s snoring would have been very audible. That would have been super embarrassing and maybe they would have asked us to leave. I had to prevent that. In those silent pauses, I held my little angel’s snoring mouth shut. I had to find the balance of not suffocating her but still making sure no sound escaped into the church’s silence. Waking her up was not an option for me. She slept until the end of the concert, and I worried in those short silent pauses about not cutting off her air too much. Relaxed music listening is different.

I managed it. The concert ended, I woke her up, and no one noticed anything. There is also difficult silence.