Speaking of Silence

I once read that the average person speaks for only seven minutes a day. Hard to believe. The thought of somebody going around with a stopwatch is almost unspeakable.

At this time of my life, I can go through some days saying only seven words and they might be, damn, no, not interested, wrong number and thanks. The first when I burned the toast and the others answering scams. The last word might happen if a neighbor notices a package at my door. Maybe this is why people own dogs, to hear themselves give orders and then say, good boy. Instead, I now have Alexa to do my bidding.

As a kid I would guess I never came close to that seven-minute mark even between school and schoolyard banter. It occurs to me how little I spoke while sinking my jump shot or hitting the ball over the fence. Damn I was good and silently so. Baseball taught stoicism. Trash talk had not yet become a second language.

On the other hand, as I became politicalized, I thought I knew everything and I took it as my mission to set the world right. Those were my obnoxious years. I told them what to do and did they listen? No, and with good reason.

 My father was a man of few words which gave added credibility to them when he chimed in. As a pharmacist I, too, learned the weight of words; listening was more important. In the early days we were actually prohibited from telling any more about prescriptions than the doctor had ordered. I remember some physicians wrote Do Not Label so even the name of the medication was to be withheld. Now, full disclosure is mandatory. The definition of a pharmacist has changed from dispenser to counselor.

Silence in court. Nobody talks in elevators, libraries or when having a root canal. Husbands are famously non-communicative. Nobody likes a blabbermouth.

Fast forward half a century and we have grown less communal even as we are more connected. Messaging has muzzled our telephone voice. We are a crowded planet but atomized. Breakfast talk has yielded to a photo of French toast exchanged with a shot of scrambled eggs.

On the other hand a few decades back one might get arrested for mumbling while rumbling along a city street. Now the outlier would be the person not talking when walking. 

So I shouldn't be surprised when Google, that unimpeachable source, now says we speak eighteen minutes minimum per day. There we are, each in our cubicle, yakking or Zooming ourselves to oblivion. Of course, I am writing this in my imagined monastic cell so what do I know?

I can hear that cacophony in my head. Some of us are nearly deafened by all the mindless chatter on social media, ads for mattresses, restaurant noise, pundits bloviating and distant artillery. We may need to find that sanctuary within to mute the buzz. This would be what the poet meant when he aspired to make his silences more accurate.