Don’t Speak (Or The World’s Second Longest Sentence)
It’s weirdly fascinating for me to observe just how much time is actually spent speaking only to say nothing worth mentioning, in fact I’d venture to say that the majority of any social interaction is superficial at best, most of the time its just people who like to hear the sound of their own voice talking at a temporary and joint purpose, I can only imagine how much people would actually speak if we were only allowed to stick to the topics that truly mattered or made a difference, stuff like how to change a tire or, you know, how to start a fire in the woods, these kinds of things actually make a difference in our daily lives and how we pass them, although I’m guessing not a huge difference because the fact of the matter is that not nearly enough people follow the old saying and count to ten before speaking, hell, even counting to three would probably make for an improvement considering the way that most people just rattle on for days, pretending that they’re imparting the wisdom of the ages onto everyone when in reality they’re just speaking from their hindquarters, pardon my French, and speaking of the French, I find it interesting that in some countries like France the dominant social culture actually demands that you talk someone’s head off as a sign of good manners, humanity has become so dependent on this white noise of human communication that we’ve turned it into an ingrained social custom, and at least in France they’ve got the added benefit of all that beautiful culture to talk about, so beautiful in fact that its no wonder some people find pleasure and entertainment in listening to an elderly Frenchman go on endlessly about Gruyere cheese, I mean, God, Marcel Proust was able to detail the process of falling asleep through an eight page long sentence and was still able to make it sound like the most beautiful piece of prose in the history of literature, anyway, back to my initial point, there should be a law which prohibits citizens from overindulging in this increasingly annoying habit of talking so pointlessly, or at the very least we should all be allowed to carry whistles around our necks and blast them whenever we find someone has begun to go off the rails with the bottomless jibber-jabber, hey that idea actually isn’t half bad, perhaps I’ll patent it, make loads of money off of it and purchase my own private island away from all the annoying, inane chit-chat, but I’m going off my point again, here’s something that I truly love: those oath of silence monks, I mean, they really are amazing to just decide one afternoon that they’re going to completely zip it for a decade or however long it is and that’s it, no matter how much they feel like letting that tongue loose because God knows monks like to gossip just like the rest of us, and I’m sorry if that offended anyone it was completely unintentional, I swear, but as I was saying, I think it might do the world some good if more of us took this oath of silence thing, I think we’d all just get enough space and clarity in our heads to finally sort our thoughts out and hear them loud and clear for the first time, but, if I’m being honest, I don’t think that any of these people who can’t be bothered to shut up for half a minute actually give a damn about those of us who might want some peace and quite, and these people probably know who they are, now I would say that I’m a relatively laid back person, but sometimes it drives me up a wall and I just get very irritated to the point where I sometimes want to tell them to shut their pie-hole already, which, if you ask me, is the perfect expression for that kind of scenario and would probably do the trick if I had the courage to actually use it, although I doubt someone like the French would actually get it but, again, they’re on a whole other level of useless chit-chatting as I’ve mentioned before, in fact the French find the practice of talking on end so important to them that they actually don’t have a French word for quiet in their vocabulary, which says a whole lot about the culture itself, just like Icelandic Eskimos have 213 words for snow which goes to show how much they love snow and how much more they love to talk about it, anyway, back to where we were, so one day I was out with this friend of mine who was going on and on and on about her childhood home and how she grew up with cats all her life and blah blah blah and all I could think in that moment was how much does she really think I care about all this garbage, so my suggestion is that we all come together to do the world and humanity a huge service and dedicate an entire, global day to silence, in which no one is allowed to speak a single word for the whole day.
(All my love!)
