Silence Speaks

My grandfather had a way of saying things that made them stick like burrs to your jacket.
Once, while I was chattering on about some nonsense — a dog I’d seen, a puddle I’d jumped in — he put his big hand on my shoulder and said,
“Christopher, you’ve got two ears and one mouth. That’s no accident.”

I didn’t understand it then. I thought maybe it was about math or how faces should look. But years fold up behind you like chairs after a long party, and you start to see what the old folks meant.

We are built for listening.

Two ears, like open doors on either side of the head, made to catch the world as it rushes by. One mouth, small and loud, easily set running like a wind-up toy.
We listen badly these days. We shout from windows, from screens, from the corners of our minds. We rush to fill every empty space with our own noise, afraid that silence might show us who we are.

But the best parts of living happen when we stop talking.
When we hear the crack in someone’s voice and know it’s not the words that matter, but the break between them.
When we notice the story that didn’t get told because someone didn’t know how to begin.
When we wait, and in that waiting, offer something that can’t be bought — the gift of being heard.

You can’t fix a broken heart with advice. You can’t solve loneliness by telling someone to cheer up. But you can sit still. You can stay quiet long enough to hear the whole messy, aching thing spill out.

And if you listen closely, you might hear more than words. You might hear someone’s hope, thin and threadbare but still hanging on. You might hear their fear, crouched like a rabbit in a thicket. You might even listen to yourself — the part of you that’s been aching to slow down, to stop barking into the void.

Two ears. One mouth.
Maybe that’s nature’s way of reminding us: you don’t learn anything new by hearing yourself talk.

You learn by leaning in.
By catching the whispered things.
By being the one who stays quiet a little longer than feels comfortable.

Listen twice as much as you speak. Maybe even more.
The world doesn’t need more noise.
It needs more people who are willing to hear the things nobody knows how to say.