The Weight of Silence

I spent this morning trying to fix a wobbly chair in the kitchen. I kept tightening the screws, but the floor in my apartment is just uneven enough that it never quite settled. I ended up sitting on the floor instead, just leaning my back against the wall, listening to the hum of the refrigerator. It was quiet—the kind of quiet that makes you realize how much noise you usually carry around in your head. We spend so much of our lives trying to level things out, trying to make everything fit perfectly into place. But maybe the beauty isn’t in the stability. Maybe it is in the way the earth tilts, or the way a space feels when it is left entirely to its own devices, untouched by our need to fix or rearrange. There is a profound kind of peace in recognizing that some things are meant to be vast, rugged, and completely beyond our control. Does the silence ever make you feel smaller, or does it make you feel more like yourself?

Orhan Aksel has captured this feeling perfectly in his image titled Monument Valley. It reminds me that there are places in this world that don’t need us to fix them at all. What does this vastness stir up in you?