Silence is Golden?

Silence. Such a strange word. Some say silence is golden. Others say silence is lonely and deafening. I've been asked what silence means to me. I generally hate silence. I don't mean the silence you pray for when standing in line at Wal-Mart and the woman in front of you is trying in vain to hush her shrieking infant. THAT silence IS golden.

The silence I hate is that awkward quiet that happens in a conversation, or after midnight when no one else is awake. The kind that speaks to your inner child and says, "You're all alone."

There's a difference between mere quietness and total silence. A nice quiet afternoon is wonderful. A lifetime of the silence that occurs from being trapped in your own mind is torture. Busy people generally have no idea which is which.

Busy people tend to run around in their cell phone and pager enduced euphoria, ringing and beeping their way through the world. They don't care to stop for a moment to smell the proverbial roses. They can't turn off their electronic umbilical cords long enough to enjoy the songs of birds as they sit on their branches. I personally find this tragic.

They have the capacity to do the things I can only wish for, yet they choose to be lead around by their technological leashes, never wondering why they subject themselves to it.

Then on the other end of the spectrum, you have people like me. Insane to some, excentric to others, trapped in our own turmultuous minds. We watch life fly by at light speed from the confines of our own psyche, wondering, "Why?"

We watch the "busy" people with a mixture of envy and contempt. Envy for the normalcy that we can't have and contempt for the idiot's that we view them as being, because they don't see what they're missing.

Are they just blind? Or are they stupid? Maybe both? Or there is always the ignorance factor. Ignorance to the obvious pleasures they miss on a daily basis that we long for.

I rememeber walking through the grocery store, wishing I was home. I looked up in time to see a mother pushing her three children around in her grocery carriage, cell phone pressed to her ear. The kids were grabbing things off the shelves, throwing various junk food items into the cart and screaming at each other.

The mother wasn't frazzled by this. She wasn't fazed by the mountain of sugar encrusted cereal that now invaded her carriage. She wasn't ready to duct tape the kids and leave them in the frozen food section as she ran for the door singing "they're comming to take me away." She merely cupped her hand over the reciever of her phone and said quietly, "Stop fighting." and went back to her conversation.

In a way I admire her. I know I wouldn't have handled the situation while holding onto my composuer. I would have been ready to tear my hair out and sit sobbing in a corner of the store.

How do people deal with the everyday task of living without having fantasies of blowing their heads off? Could it be that their cell phones and pager offer some super human strength? Or are they the crazy, delusional ones? What exactly is sanity anyway?

These are the things I sit and wonder about in those silent times. My inner child cries and begs for an Oreo, while my adult side says, "No, it's too late for so much sugar." in it's studious mommy voice.

Maybe we're the sane ones. By "we" I mean the ones classified as "Mentally Ill". I know I tend to see things for what they are and not for what I want them to be, and this has gotten me classified as a pessimist. If I look at a rose from my lover, I see a pretty flower. I do not see what many others see.

Other people see unspoken promises and tend to view it as proof of the love that is longed for. Unfortunatly, (or fortunatly) I see it as a fragrant gift. I wait for spoken promises and take them at face value. If someone says to me, "I love you." I don't try to figure out what they "really" meant by that or gague the sincerity. I simply accept it for what it is.

Maybe that's what makes me Mentally Ill. Maybe the busy people, with their kryptonite cell phones, pagers and laptops understand what I don't... That there is usually a catch to recieving that rose. They seem to hear things that I don't. The woman who is told she looks nice today by a co-worker, then files a sexual harassment claim, must have heard more then the compliment I would have taken it to be.

Maybe I'm just deaf to the inner meanings that other people seem to grasp. Maybe I'm just blind to what they see. I suppose I'm just one step behind everyone else....

I'm gonna have to ponder this for a while. Maybe I'll make a compromise between my inner child and adult sides, and have some Oreo's with non-fat milk.