VACUUS

Try this some evening. Turn off the music, put the phone in another room and sit for five minutes without doing anything. Most people last about forty seconds before a hand reaches for something.

Silence is uncomfortable because it is never quite empty. The moment the noise stops, other things arrive. A thought you have been avoiding. A tiredness you had not noticed. The sound of your own breathing, which is suddenly very loud.

Parmenides, one of the strangest and most influential thinkers of ancient Greece, argued that nothingness can be neither thought nor spoken of. The moment you try, you turn it into something. Later Greeks built whole theories of the void on top of his puzzle. For most of us the puzzle is simpler and closer: we can hardly bear a room with nothing in it, because we are still in the room.

Much of modern life is arranged to keep that room full. Television in the background, a podcast on the walk to the shop, a feed for every spare minute. None of it is wrong. It just leaves very little space in which we might hear ourselves.

Silence is the one room where nothing is lying to you.

If you stay past the first uncomfortable minute, something shifts. The thoughts that arrived first begin to settle. What is left is quieter, and often kinder, than you expected.

Nothing happens in those five minutes. That turns out to be the point.