Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Day 523: A Day of Silence

24 Aoril, 2011

I think I have begun to get restless finally. Even after yoga and multiple socializing events etc., I was feeling rather incomplete yesterday evening. So I decided that I would do something totally different, something that I have never tried before.

After a bit of brainstorming with the self, I decided to maintain silence. Complete silence for 24 hours. Which means no talking, no chatting, no tweeting, no communication over Facebook etc. I am free to listen to other people chattering, but I shall not participate in the conversation. That was the whole idea. The experiment was to be from midnight on Saturday night all the way untill midnight on Sunday night.

And so the experiment began! I had expected myself to I suffer from an overwhelming craving to open my mouth or at least comment on Twitter or Facebook! I knew that I could easily maintain silence for a few hours but had expected a whole day to prove difficult.

Interestingly enough, it wasn't! I found it pretty easy to keep to my thoughts without having to express them. It could also have been a by product of my rather weak social life (there was hardly anyone expressing a desire to have a conversation with me), but I do like to think that I am social at least in the online space, which was also curbed but which didn't seem to affect me.

By evening, I felt that this was too easy a game, so I decided to get out of the house to do some shopping and figure out how difficult would that be without talking.

Interestingly, that didn't prove to be too difficult either. Only two instances were a bit weird:
a) When I figured that telling the cabbie where to go would be a bit tough without talking - this situation was resolved by taking the train instead.
b) When the girls at the shops greet you with a big "Good Evening Ma'm!" and all you can do is smile politely and feel really rude to be not replying back.

Other than the above, it was quite a breeze. Singapore is not known for great customer service but today it seemed like all the girls at the shops were unusually friendly asking me what I wanted, whether I wanna try the clothes out etc. When I just nodded or shook my head, they instantly figured out that I couldn't speak. There was a temporary, quick change in expression as they comprehended that I might be speaking-impaired, but then they continued to behave as if I were as normal as any other customer, which I thought was pretty nice.

Keeping quiet also seemed to have calmed down my brain a lot because post the shopping all I wanted to do was sit in a scenic spot and gaze into space. So I did exactly that. I walked to the bridge next to the Merlion Walk and gazed towards Marina Bay Sands and Nicole Highway for the longest time. The hubby (who was quite supportive of this idea of me being silent) joined later and we had a dinner over silence.

I waited it out until midnight to complete the experiment and was quite happy when it was done successfully! I must also add here that I was so excited about having passed the experiment in flying colours, that I couldn't wait to gloat about it to the hubby. As soon as the clock struck 12 at night, I rushed off to find him and discovered that he was already fast asleep (blah)! Very obviously he didn't missing my talking.

But in any case, it was a good experiment. Nothing out of the world, but definitely worth going through once in a while.

477 more to go.

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