"Circumnambulating" Silence

 There is something somewhat ironic, perhaps, about the way we meditate in this small room in the midst of a bustling city. It's precious in a way: being able to turn to silence when the world is always pushing people to affiliate in a socially complex world. I have sometimes had this sense that this silence is where my life has lead me to, only it's been a circuitous route for me: from the comfort of silence to its jarring maladjustments, and back to a revised view of silence.
   For example, as a child, I would have to say that many of my teachers classified me as a "silent" child. I think it was one of the first comments a teacher had made on one of my report cards. I recall that when others were yelling, I was somewhere inside myself, a little bit isolated from others. In a sense, this kind of "silence" is gradually socialized out of a person. In fact, it seems a pity that schools often don't honor silence in the same way that they might honor and respect a socially precocious person. Silence itself might be a powerful way for students to listen to one another and emphasize their presence rather than trying to measure each other up using words.
   Going from silence into a social life is a necessary step. Without it, there would not be any sense of community. However, as philosophers such as Rousseau (and to a certain extent Lao Tze) would appreciate, too much of a social life of a certain kind can lead a person away from her or his center. It's as though a person leaves the comfort of their own silence in order to connect with others' worlds, only to find themselves swallowed into a world of praise and blame, winning and losing. A person becomes measured by how many friends she or he has, and therefore begins to lose the sense of their own inner compass.
    Swinging back to silence, however, is not about regressing into a childhood world. I think it's about re-appraising the role of silence in community. This, to me, is a rather delicate balance. If all we know about silence is a kind of stagnant isolation from others, then silence just becomes a reaction away from the foibles of social life, a little bit like a fancy Epsom salts bath in the midst of a palace of riches. On the other hand, when silence is enveloping one's sense of connectedness, it no longer becomes an escape but more akin to an embrace. I am not judging myself as opposed to the others, and I am certainly not ignoring through silence. It is more like a silence that sees the whole situation without labelling it or reacting quickly using what one "knows".