The Need for Quiet

It’s been two months since I’ve blogged. The past six months have been filled with a variety of challenges and quite a number of losses. There are still many great aspects to my life and I continually greet the sun each morning with hope for the new day.

But I’ve also realized something in that time, especially as we ushered in a new year and the holiday season came to a close.

The need for quiet.

My writing admittedly suffered in the past year. The reasons don’t matter; what does matter is how I find my way back to it because I found that something was missing in my life without it.

Part of the problem has been the lack of silence, or at least quiet in areas of my day. I feel like we are surrounded by the constant drone of noise, whether it be people or our phones that can play just about anything now. When people are watching tv while also watching videos on their phones, something has definitely gone awry.

I think back to my days of running suicide grief support groups and learning how to be comfortable in the silence after a person speaks, taking a breath or two before jumping in with something to say. That’s how I feel about the world and my life right now. It’s like I’m not giving God room to hand me my messages because there’s so much noise around me. And that means I’m lacking the patience to write, too.

I don’t do “resolutions” so much as the turning of a new calendar year for me is a chance to take a breath and see what changes I need to make. The biggest one for 2026 has been about taking that time for the quiet, for the silence, so I can hear God, so I can write again, so I can feel like myself again.