Listening to Quiet

I love to listen to Quiet. I have a sense at times that he’s listening right back as intently as I am to him. We’re respectful toward each other, more so now, than in the beginning when we were both young and had no adult wisdom to fall back on.

The years have taught us both that filling the silence between us with idle, meaningless chatter can spoil the quality of our time with each other. We would have done that rather unthinkingly in the past, chatter on I mean, with complete and utter disregard for what we were actually missing if we’d been at all quiet! But not anymore.

And the thing about Old Man Time is that he can hold his own in a contest of wills. Neither Quiet nor me could force him to do something he didn’t want to do no matter how much of a tantrum we threw. Old Man Time, for his part, simply ignored us. Chuckled at our foot-stamping ways and shut his wizen eyes and ears to all manner of stupid behaviour on our parts.

No small wonder he chuckled so hard all those times. We knew nothing, absolutely nothing. When I think about it, we must have looked ridiculous! We pestered him to let us speak over the top of each other and even with our mouths full but he never relented. We lacked so much decorum. We were wildly uncouth. He simply waited us out. He was so clever that way.

Quiet and me, we wouldn’t sacrifice so much as a single second of being silent together now. Why? Well, let’s say we’re both older (and by inference) wiser and having been out-waited (though I suspect out-witted) by Old Man Time, we eventually learnt the lesson. Have you yet? It can take a while. I understand that now.

Sitting together the two of us, Quiet and me, in this afternoon sun, reminds me of just how comfortable we are together these days. I swear we can hear each other’s thoughts without even saying a word. We like that we’ll grow old together. You will too when you savour the lesson.