My friend Carla told me once that she used to drive with the radio off after dropping her kids at school. “Fifteen minutes,” she said. “That was the only time all day nobody was asking me anything.” She wasn’t meditating. She wasn’t doing breathwork. She was just sitting in a car that had gone still, watching the parking lot empty out, letting the engine tick. When I asked what she got from it, she looked almost confused by the question. “I could hear what I actually thought about things.” She said it the way you’d describe something obvious, like gravity. The silence wasn’t a practice for her. It was the only gap in the noise wide enough for her own mind to become audible.
What strikes me about Carla’s fifteen minutes is how little intention was involved. She didn’t set out to create a silence practice. The silence was already there once she stopped filling it. And what arrived in that space wasn’t revelation or bliss; it was just her own thinking, restored to its natural tempo. I notice this in my own life too: the moments when I understand something most clearly tend to be the ones with the least input. A walk where I forgot my headphones. A power outage that killed the background hum of appliances. The understanding doesn’t come because silence is magical. It comes because my attention, when it isn’t being pulled in six directions, can finally land somewhere and stay.
Silence has an uncomfortable reputation, and I think it’s partly earned. Sitting with no sound, no task, no scroll, the first thing that often surfaces is restlessness, or something harder: a feeling you’ve been outrunning. I spent a long stretch of my twenties treating silence like a vacuum that needed filling, and looking back, I can see that the filling was strategic. Music, podcasts, phone calls, anything to keep a low hum of company going. The discomfort of stopping wasn’t about boredom. It was about proximity to whatever I’d stacked all that noise on top of. Silence doesn’t create difficulty. It just stops covering for it. That’s why it can feel so clarifying and so unwelcome at the same time.
Carla still does her fifteen minutes, years later. Her kids are older now, the morning routine has shifted, but she guards that window of nothing. Last time we talked about it, she said something that stuck with me: “I don’t even know if it helps. I just know I’m worse without it.” I think that’s about as honest an endorsement of silence as you’ll find. No transformation story, no spiritual breakthrough. Just a woman in a parked car, engine cooling, noticing that when she lets the world go quiet for a few minutes, she can feel the shape of her own life more clearly. The quiet doesn’t answer anything. It just makes the questions her own.