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Silence. This one word is enough to make most children stop dead in their tracks, instilling fear that sends a chill up their spine, because suddenly their only tool for communication is taken away from them. Learning that there is more than one way to express yourself is a huge task as it goes beyond everything a child learns in the first few years of its life. When a baby needs food, it cries. When it is sick, it cries. When it wants to be cuddled, it cries.

Many parents will tell you that every sentence that a child utters will start with "I", but upon being introduced to communication through the medium of writing the start of an evolution is present. I remember the exact moment when I found that I no longer had to be afraid of silence because it was also the first time I turned to a pen and paper to express my feelings of desperation. It came as a shock to me that I could somehow write everything down on a page when it hurt me to much to verbalise it. That was when I understood the true worth of silence.

That being said, although I understood that I could deal with silence, it still made me extremely uncomfortable, and silence used to really bother me. Exams were a method of torture. As a child of ten being told that I had to sit in a big hall, take some scary exams and be quiet for anything up to two hours, sounded like my version of hell. Right up until a year ago I would come out of an exam of three hours and more or less burst with the accumulation of things I wished to say.

Now I've come to appreciate silence for what it is; a time for me to be completely alone with my own thoughts. Silence really can be golden when you accept it and listen to yourself. It's surprising how long you can keep yourself mentally stimulated just by re-living memories, remembering old stories or just recalling the faces of loved ones departed. Try it out for yourself, take thirty minutes to just appreciate silence and trust me you will begin to like it.

Learn more about this author, Jen Dye.
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