Silence is helpful at times.

This weekend, I met some relatives that usually relate to me through Facebook as we don’t meet that often. One of them pointed out that I’d gone silent for some time, and I couldn’t but agree. I’ve been working more in the past half year than I have the previous 2. On top of that, I haven’t had the urge to write. I’ve felt the need to both be more silent, just as well as having more silence around me. Not reading whenever I can. Not feeding myself ideas and thoughts through podcasts or conversations every free minute.

Just some silence.

Everything takes capacity in some form or other. I’ve come to think of it as bandwidth rather than taking time, because I can almost always create more time. It’s quite easy to prioritise and rearrange. But I don’t have unlimited bandwidth. I usually have a lot more than I’ve had the past spring, at least more available when I need it.

What the silence does for me is to make bandwidth available. It makes some for that capacity free for me to use at my own will, or for the things that I think needs my attention the most at the moment. And that’s what I’ve needed to do lately, free it up.

That silence looks different for everybody. I’ve still had a Facebook presence during this time, even though I haven’t had the app installed on my phone in 4 months. On Instagram on the other hand, I haven’t posted anything in almost 3 moths. I’ve listened to some podcasts occasionally, but a good deal less than usually. And I have published a text every now and then, when I felt like it.

But the silence is still dominating. Intentionally and purposefully.