Silence has many dimensions. It can be a regression and an escape, a loss of self, or it can be presence, awareness, unification, self-discovery. Negative silence blurs and confuses our identity, and we lapse into daydreams or diffuse anxieties. Positive silence pulls us together and makes us realize who we are, who we might be, and the distance between the two. Hence, positive silence implies a choice, and what Paul Tillich called the "courage to be."
Is it possible to see the future as dark and darkening further; to reject false hope and
desperate pseudo-optimism without collapsing into despair?...if you don't feel despair, in
times like these, you are not fully alive. But there has to be something beyond despair,
too; or rather, something that accompanies it, like a companion on the road....I am
going to pick up [my scythe] and go and find some grass to mow. I am going to cut
great swaths of it...I am going to walk ahead, following the ground... I am going to
breathe the still-clean air and listen to the still-singing birds and reflect on the fact that
the earth is older and harder than the machine that is eating it—that it is indeed more
resilient than fragile—and that change comes quickly when it comes, and that
knowledge is not the same as wisdom.