David McElroy

Lauren is a university professor. We met several years ago and she immediately impressed me. She was intelligent, thoughtful and highly accomplished. She came across as serious and rational.

One day, she started talking to me about Taylor Swift.

I assumed she simply liked the music. Millions of people do. There wouldn’t have been anything unusual about that. But the longer she talked, the stranger the conversation began to feel.

She told me about traveling to concerts. She talked about exchanging “friendship bracelets” with strangers she’d never met before. She described the emotional connection fans felt with each other — and with Swift herself — in ways that sounded as though she was talking about a guru or messiah.

These weren’t simply people attending concerts for entertainment. They were devotees gathering with other devotees who believed they were participating in something meaningful together. They seemed to believe they had discovered some important truth.

What fascinated me most was the intensity of it. I’ve known religious converts who spoke with less passion. And this woman wasn’t unusual.

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A woman I’ve known for years sent me a message a few years back — and it’s on my mind again tonight.

It wasn’t flirtatious. In fact, that was what made it feel so strangely heavy.

She wasn’t trying to begin anything romantic. She wasn’t hinting that she wanted an affair or that she was hoping to leave her husband. She made that very clear from the beginning. Instead, she simply wanted me to know something that had slowly dawned on her over the years.

She said she had misunderstood what kind of person she actually needed as a partner. She had thought the man she married represented the things that mattered to her. It turned out that I represented what really mattered to her. She just hadn’t known that back then.

We had known each other online for a long time and had met in person a couple of times. Nothing romantic ever developed. There was no dramatic split or unresolved tension. We had simply moved in different directions.

She eventually married another man. From the outside, her life appeared stable and successful. I rarely heard from her anymore. Then I got that long message one evening explaining that she had been quietly unhappy in her marriage almost from the beginning.

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We seem to be terrified of silence — and I think I know why.

It’s a few minutes after 1 a.m. right now and I’m taking a short walk in my neighborhood. It’s very quiet. The streets are quiet. I’ve seen only one car since I’ve been out. Even the railroad tracks just a couple of blocks away are empty and silent right now.

There are occasional birds and insects, but most of nature seems to have gone to sleep for the night.

The silence of the world around me means I can hear something else. I hear my own thoughts clearly inside my head. In a way it’s hard to describe, the beautiful silence allows me to hear some spiritual connection — to nature, to the universe, to God.

What do I hear in the silence? I hear moral clarity. I hear truth that my heart whispers. I hear echoes of love and peace and hope. All of these things are quiet. The sounds are fragile and beautiful and sacred.

What I’m hearing isn’t about me. It’s not about my preferences or my ego. It’s about the truth of objective reality. It’s about love and being loved. It’s about truth.

Silence scares most people because they’re afraid of all those things. Unconsciously, they would rather chase noise to drown out truths that make them feel vulnerable.

The noise with which they fill their lives lets them indulge in the fantasy that they are gods. That they are the centers of their universe. That truth is whatever they want it to be.

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