Some kinds of silence don't comfort you. They just show up. Whether you're ready or not.
I heard one for the first time when I was five. I was standing at the edge of a Himalayan valley, too young to have words for what I was seeing. I didn't know it then, but I'd spend the next thirty-seven years either running from that silence, or slowly finding my way back to it.
Most people think silence means nothing is happening. It's the opposite. It's what shows up once the noise clears—everything the noise was hiding, all at once.
Why silence is hard, not peaceful
This is why sitting still is so much harder than it sounds. Not physically hard. What's hard is what surfaces once you stop distracting yourself.
Old grief. Unfinished conversations. The person you've been too busy to think about. Silence doesn't ask permission before showing you these things—and it usually shows you the hardest ones first.
I spent many years in the Army after that first walk in the mountains. The Army teaches you to control your breath, your fear and your body. It does not teach you what to do with a silence that refuses to go away.
Silence is not the absence of experience. It is where hidden experience finally becomes visible.
You can't “achieve” silence
For a long time, I thought the goal was to reach some permanent, glowing calm— like a finish line.
I don't think that anymore. After thirty-seven years of getting this wrong in almost every way possible, here's what I actually believe: the goal isn't to reach silence. It's to stop flinching when it shows up. That's the whole job.
Everything else—the sitting practice, the people around you, even a place like the mountains—is just there to make that one thing a little easier. Nobody ever fully masters it. You just get a little less startled by your own mind, one sitting at a time.
Where to start
If any of this feels familiar—if you've sensed something quieter underneath your normal, busy week—you don't need a trip to the Himalayas to begin.
You need five minutes. A quiet room. And the willingness to notice what comes up, without rushing to fix it or explain it away.
That's the whole first step. The mountain came later for me. It doesn't have to come first for you.