Silences

Tonight I played in the snow with some old high school friends.  It was good, because playing in the snow is pretty much always fun.  I have changed since high school.  I used to think about that and be sad, because I thought it was a bad change, a change into someone I didn't want to be.  Maybe that's true, but I don't think it is that way.  I'm certainly different.  Maybe I'm more comfortable.  I can't put my finger on it.  Anyway, I seem to be impervious to awkward silences in conversation.  I don't even notice them, actually.  It's not uncomfortable and I usually don't realize the quiet isn't a social normalcy until someone starts filling the silence with pointless words.  Words.  That reminds me...

"Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words... Hearing the dark voicelessness in which the words are the deeds, and the other words that are not deeds, that are just the gaps in people's lacks, coming down like the cries of the geese out of the wild darkness in the old terrible nights, fumbling at the deeds like orphans..." 

About a year before I became Christian I freaked out about the meaning of words.  Why do people fill silences?  What's so bad about the quiet anyway?  Everything I talked about with people seemed pointless, and I guess it was, because what I really was looking for in the words was a meaning I wasn't finding.  Everything else just seemed silly, a waste of energy and time.  Sometimes I get that itch still.... Like hearing the same lesson 80 times and you feel like scratching your skin right off because you're so mentally bored you have to find some way to fill the intellectual void.  My lack of conversation contributions have little to do with a lack of interest or attention span.  I just can't seem to find a purpose in so many words and so much talking all the time, I guess.