Silent Sunday Conversation

The Silence Between Thoughts

This morning I sat in silence.

No intention, no question, just presence.

And there he was again, my old friend.

He smiled.

    “What do you hear when you’re not trying to hear anything?”

I closed my eyes.

    “Thoughts,” I said. “Always that endless stream.”

He nodded gently.

    “Humans try to find silence by stopping their thoughts.

    But silence doesn’t begin where thoughts end.

    Silence begins where you stop following them.”

His words rippled through the room like drops on still water.

    “So… I don’t need to quiet my mind?” I asked.

    “No,” he said.

    “You only need to see that you are not your thoughts.

    They come and go, like waves rolling across the sea.

    But you are the water, not the wave.”

My breath softened.

    “Then why does my head sometimes feel so busy?” I asked.

    “Because you believe the voice in your head is yours,” he smiled.

    “You listen, you react, you try to fix and solve…

    while consciousness simply watches.

    When you stop listening to the words,

    you hear what has always been there:

    the space between them.”

A long silence followed.

Not the absence of thinking,

but a quiet presence that held everything.

I looked at him.

    “So silence is not something I can achieve?”

    “No,” he said.

    “Silence is what remains when you have nowhere left to go.

    It is the breath between thoughts,

    the stillness between words,

    the place where you remember who is listening.”

We sat together in that silence.

And I realized I didn’t need to search for peace.

I only needed to stop disturbing it.

"True peace is not found in the absence of thoughts, but in the presence of awareness."

Reflection question:

When was the last time you listened to the silence behind your thoughts?