“Talking to keep yourself warm”

is a Finnish idiom my mom taught me that I like so much. It means what you might think it means: talking for no reason.

An apocryphal Finnish story:

A man and his mute teenage son were walking in a forest. The father was walking ahead and after a cracking sound he heard a voice behind him say, “Dad! Watch out! A tree is going to fall!” He turned around in shock—his son had spoken!—and a giant tree fell across the path in front of them. They stood there in silence a moment and then the father said, “I had no idea. I had no idea you could speak!”

His son shrugged and said, “There was nothing important to say.”

You’re allowed to be quiet. You’re allowed to not know what to say. You’re allowed to not speak before you’re ready.

There are valuable things to know that you can’t think towards in words or even know in words once you’re starting to know them.

A large enough dose of silence will eventually make something bubble up that makes you say, “Huh,” and you’ll know enough what you mean, and you’ll know that if you try and grab the bubbled-up understanding by the neck and cram it into words too fast, you’ll kill it.

You don’t have to fill the silence. You don’t have to fill your own silence, ie, you don’t have to know the thing you want to know as fast as you want to know it. And you don’t have to fill all the silences around you, socially, to perform who you are for the people so they won’t forget you.

If you’re quiet, you’ll know where this applies and where it doesn’t apply. Sometimes your words are needed. But it’s not so often that they’re needed. Welcome, yes, widely and a lot. Needed, not so often.

I wanted to know this today and I thought you might want to know this, too.